Limits of the Known

by David Roberts

  At the end of our meeting with the elders in the courtyard, they seemed abashed at how much they had told us. The man with the palsied hand said, “You can only talk about your own village. You can’t talk about another village.” In the more touristic towns toward the center of the Bandiagara, European antiquaries had spawned a black market by persuading the Dogon to sell Tellem artifacts they had discovered in the shared burial caves. And the Dutch teams had brought back their own Tellem grave goods to serve as museum pieces. On a visit to Utrecht before my trip to Mali, I had beheld these strange objects, left by the Tellem to accompany the dead into eternity: not only the ceramic pots I had seen from my rope as my partners dangled me down the cliff, but finger bells made of copper, bracelets of iron, and necklaces made of hexagonal carnelian beads. Beside the skeletons, the ancients had laid bows, quivers, and hoes that had been broken in half to “retire” them from functional use. The most exquisite of the grave relics were beautifully carved wooden headrests, which remain the oldest manmade wooden artifacts yet found in sub-Saharan Africa (alas, on the European black market, the headrests fetch hefty prices).

  At the time of my visit, the illegal trade in antiquities had not yet spread its tentacles to Tireli Sud. Curiously, in that village the Dogon never used Tellem caves for their own burials, seeking out instead untouched alcoves relatively low in the cliff. The elders in the courtyard had seen Tellem antiquities, but they had no interest in collecting them, much less selling them to foreigners. Waving his hand at the precipice above the village, the man with the outraged visage said that no Dogon had ever been to those higher ledges, indicating the distant alcoves from whose mouths we could glimpse protruding boulins. But yes, they were sure to be full of Tellem graves and Tellem grave goods.

  I left the Bandiagara after my month of exploration with more questions nagging at my brain than answers. The main reason that in subsequent years I would doubt that the Anasazi had used ropes as crucial tools in reaching their own alcoves was that thick baobab ropes were so obviously central to the Tellem achievement. Not only was every boulin scored with deep rope grooves, but all over the Bandiagara we found long hanks of rope that were discarded in the ruins or still hanging in place. Something like the same time gap had yawned between the Tellem disappearance and the present day as stretched back to the Anasazi abandonment of the Colorado Plateau. Yet even the earliest archaeologists had found precious little rope in Anasazi ruins, and at its strongest it would have been too thin and fragile to hold a human body.

  Western climbers tend to assume that the only way to ascend difficult cliffs is by some variant of a technique perfected over the last two centuries, starting in the Alps. The essence of that modus operandi is a rope connecting two climbers, one of whom stands attached to the cliff and belays his partner as he leads above, placing “protection” (pitons, nuts, spring-loaded cams, and occasionally expansion bolts) to shorten his potential fall. Gradually, however, I had sketched out my hunch of a very different Anasazi climbing technique. The key to prehistoric ascents in the Southwest, I believe, was log ladders notched with hand- and footholds and leaned against the cliff from one ledge to a higher one. Often the ladder on the higher ledge would be placed not directly above the lower one, but 50 or even 100 feet to the right or left, where the cliff yielded a subtle weakness. If the Anasazi were virtuosi of any technique, it would have been scaling scary ladders and traversing wildly exposed ledges.

  No such theory fit Tellem ascents. I caught a glimpse of a possible vestige of the lost art in a few places where a vertical crack sported a series of sticks jammed tight, one above the next. These were not boulins. I guessed that they might have served like pitons, as points of protection for a roped leader or (more likely) for “aid,” holds from which to hang, pull oneself up, then stand. But these sequences of jammed sticks were far too rare to account for access to all the hundreds of Tellem alcoves, the most inaccessible of which loomed above blank overhangs without a vertical crack in sight.

  Anasazi climbing was a dazzling performance, no matter how it was accomplished, manifestly far more daring than what Antoine de Ville and his cronies had pulled off on Mont Aiguille in 1492. But Tellem ascent was in a league of its own, its most remote alcoves harder to get to than any Anasazi granary. Twenty-nine years after my visit to Mali, no Westerner has been able to explain it.

  After my in-depth encounters with the Anasazi and the Tellem, I wondered how many other preliterate cultures around the world might have harbored serious climbers. The most valuable thing the Anasazi and the Tellem taught me was that climbing for all the reasons Western culture holds sacrosanct (and that I myself had felt)—the glory of putting up a new route or reaching a summit, the thrill of exploring new land no matter how tightly defined, the challenge of overcoming difficult obstacles and warding off danger, the joy of the perfect partnership—had nothing to do with the reasons that the Anasazi and Tellem climbed. If we can judge from appearances, the Anasazi climbed to hide their precious grain away from invaders in hard times. They left behind their ruins, their astonishing rock art, and such enigmatic artifacts as the split-twig figurines. But they cared so little for their dead that the most common burial site was the midden—the trash pile directly below the settlement.

  The Tellem, on the other hand, devoted all their energy and skill to trying to ensure the immortality of their dead, or at least to preventing their bodies from being vandalized by enemies. Those burial alcoves and the grave goods left inside them are virtually all that remains today of Tellem culture.

  In Western civilization, we go to our own considerable lengths to enshrine the dead. We lay out cemeteries in which to bury our loved ones, cover their coffins with dirt and grass, and erect headstones inscribed with the names, dates, and a word or two or a favorite quotation to mark the passing of an irreplaceable person. Or we cremate the body, scatter the ashes in a special place, and vow to return to connect with the lost one’s spirit.

  But the tombstones fade and erode until the inscriptions are reduced to unreadable “dog-biscuits” (Maya epigraphers’ slang for weathered hieroglyphs), and the ashes are gone with the wind, or into the soil. No, we cannot keep the dead with us as the Tellem did.

  I knew of three or four cultures elsewhere in the world that practiced what looked like serious climbing in the cliffs. They dwelt in very difficult places to get to. It would take a monumental investment of time and money and preparation to explore them, or a generous assignment of the kind that magazines were no longer dishing out in the 2000s. Still, I hoped to get there, “but knowing how way leads on to way,” and ruing how little time there is in a single lifetime . . .

  The Chachopoya flourished in the rain forest near the headwaters of the Amazon in northern Peru from about the year 800 to the end of the fifteenth century, when they were conquered by the Inca. Until recently, they have been little-known and even less studied. In several places the Chachopoya built wildly teetering and substantial edifices in nearly vertical cliffs made of loose limestone, apparently placing their highest structures as far as 200 feet off the ground.

  Like the Tellem, some of the Chachopoya resorted to the cliffs to house their dead. But these Andeans mummified the bodies, through an elaborate process of removing the innards, drying the corpses, then wrapping them in cloth and installing them in the fetal position. According to Keith Muscutt, whose Warriors of the Clouds offers an excellent survey of what little is known about the Chachopoya, many of the skulls show fracture signs, ambiguously pointing either to battle wounds or to ritual execution. Many of the skulls also exhibit scars from trepanning, the practice of deliberately boring a hole in the cranium. These could be stigmata from desperate attempts to save the victims’ lives, or they could further testify to some macabre rite of sacrifice.

  Muscutt speculates that because some of the cantilevered buildings, parts of whose floors hang in thin air over the void, also have fronting platforms attached to them, the Chachopoya may have regularly displa
yed the mummies, or aired them out to dry between rains. A few rows of the dead have received special attention by being interred standing up in chullpas—anthropomorphic coffins, with painted ornaments and elongated heads, looking something like the Easter Island statues. These eerie reminders of mortality loom ominously over the misty valley below. Such special treatment would seem to argue for a reverence for dead ancestors, but some cultures, including the Inca, also conferred sacred display on their sacrificial victims.

  No trained climber has yet visited the cliffs of La Petaca or its companion, Diablo Huasi, where the hanging tombs are clustered, to gauge the true difficulty of climbing up to them. A handful of archaeologists and journalists have reached them by rappelling from the tops of the cliffs; but on rappel, it’s very hard to rate a move, let alone a pitch. Muscutt reports that many of the holds low on the cliff have been polished smooth. Such polishing, nearly unique to limestone, results from scores or hundreds of climbers grasping and standing on the holds. Does this clue reveal the secret of Chachopoya ascent? Probably not, as it could merely reflect the ceremonial passage of latter-day worshipers.

  No matter what, the same puzzle that afflicted me as I explored the Anasazi leaps out in Peru. It is one thing to climb a steep cliff to reach a high ledge or alcove. It is quite another to build an elaborate structure there, much less to raise mummies to it and install them therein.

  On the opposite side of the globe from Peru, in the South Sulawesi province of Indonesia, a people called the Toraja also use cliffs to enshrine the dead. These natives are in one sense an archaeologist’s dream, for they continue to practice a burial ritual that is at least seven hundred years old. Not only can they be observed carrying out their customs, but (with the usual anthropological caveats) they can be asked why and how they are performing them.

  Like the Chachopoya refuges, the Toraja graves are installed in limestone precipices. The rock is soft enough to be shaped with the vigorous use of metal hammers and spikes. Access seems uniformly to be by means of scaffolding and ladders made out of soft bamboo, and thus the installations being crafted today are for the most part not that high off the ground.

  Ledges and niches to receive the dead are prepared months or even years beforehand. The funeral ceremony is a festive occasion, lasting several days, gathering hundreds. For the most part, the dead are laid not in the rock niches themselves, but in wooden biers and coffins that protrude from the cliff, propped in place with strong wooden beams (whence the epithet “hanging graves of Sulawesi”). Painted effigies sometimes accompany the dead, arranged in galleries like spectators in theater boxes. Babies are interred in hollowed-out trees.

  The Toraja are animists who worship their ancestors, but there is evidence that the religion (and no doubt the burial rites) were modified by the advent of the Dutch in the seventeenth century, with the pressure to convert to Christianity. Today’s practice does not usually involve real climbing. But tantalizing myths from the past hint at a more vertical ceremony. There is the legend of Pala’ Toke’ (“arm of a gecko”), a place where either a single genius or a whole class of virtuosi could climb the cliffs like geckos, with palms that stuck to the rock. Their job was to get noblemen’s coffins to higher perches than scaffolding could reach.

  Height off the ground is supposed to be proportional to rank in life, so the most exalted dead need coffins hanging from quite lofty eminences. At the Londa site, a few graves are reported to lie as high as 150 feet above the foot of the cliff. It is hard to imagine scaffolding sturdy enough to reach such ledges. Once more, the phenomenon is wreathed in mystery.

  Mustang is a formerly independent kingdom near the headwaters of the Kali Gandaki and Muktinath river systems high on the Tibetan plateau. It was annexed by Nepal in the eighteenth century, but it remains ethnically Tibetan. Here a vast array of caves (as many as ten thousand) ranges across high cliffs overlooking desolate valleys. The rock is a conglomerate so soft that it can be easily carved with wooden tools. Like the cavates of Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico, carved out of soft tufa by many generations of the Anasazi, the caves of Mustang are mostly manmade.

  Archaeologists have identified six successive periods of occupation of the caves, dating back to 1200 BC. Each era seems to have found different purposes for the grottos. The caves from the first three periods—spanning nearly two millennia, from 1200 BC to 700 AD—were used almost entirely for burial purposes. With the introduction of Buddhism around 700 AD, caves, sometimes very difficult to get to, became hermitages or meditation chambers. From that date through present times, the caves also cradled dwellings and, during the last four hundred years, storage chambers.

  Sorting out the tangled history of these caves is thus an immensely complicated business. In 2011, a team from NOVA and the National Geographic Society descended on Mustang to make a film called Cave People of the Himalaya. The narrative arc seems to have been inspired by Indiana Jones, so a potentially ruinous campaign of access and salvage passes for the heroic rescue of threatened treasure. The climbers hack away at the cliff with drills, ice axes, and crampons, carving a passage in the fragile rock that no ancient could be presumed to have used, since bolt guns and ice axes were in short supply in 500 BC. Once inside the chambers, the rescue team shoves ancient manuscripts into duffel bags like so many groceries, then lowers them to the ground, where “helpers” beat the fragile sheaves on the rocks to get the dirt out. The cameras frame this ludicrous and destructive enterprise as responsible archaeology.

  It is much more likely that ladders and scaffolding launched from ledges that intersect the cliffs were the key to reaching and carving the grottos. Some of the cave systems involve elaborate tunnels connecting chambers on many different levels. In one such site, human mummies were found in the seventh story of a manmade complex of interlinked rooms. To reach that arcane mausoleum, other modern discoverers used climbing gear, which, again, the ancients did not have and therefore could not have used.

  Needless to say, the rich history of this extensive series of troglodytic settlements has only begun to be illuminated. The kinds of climbing it took to reach and carve out these strange vertical creations remain an enigma. There is little evidence that rope played a major role in the prehistoric ascent of the Mustang cliffs. And there is no doubt that danger of the highest order haunted every aspect of the centuries of worship and retreat that took place here.

  In 1998, on assignment for Men’s Journal, I visited Petra and the Wadi Rum in Jordan. My companions were two good rock climbers, and one of our goals was to explore the limitless climbing possibilities of the jebels in the Wadi Rum—massively convoluted, multihued buttes of sandstone rising as much as 2,500 feet above the desert floor. After 1984, these domes had become a favorite arena for European climbers putting up long, serious routes on cliffs that vary from solid to loose and crumbly.

  We had no guides to direct our wanderings in the Wadi Rum, but I knew that this spectacular wilderness had been a favorite haunt of Bedouins for at least the last two thousand years. On my second or third day there, intrigued by the challenge of finding any route to the summits of the complex jebels, I stumbled upon the first of several ancient Bedouin routes that wove in and out of buttresses and chasms as they made their way toward the highest reaches of the domes. Leaving my partners to prospect short, hard routes on the lower reaches of the jebels, I took up the challenge of following the old Bedouin trails. Doing so became a game not without risk, since in order to plumb the weaknesses of the jebels, the Bedouin had mastered intricate strategies involving zigzags, traverses, short downclimbs, and small overhangs. I came to recognize Bedouin markers that defined these routes: one-stone cairns, short pieces of wood jammed in cracks for aid, stones wedged like climbers’ nuts and cams in cracks to use as handholds and footholds. It would have been quite easy to get lost along the way, in which case a solo descent would have been extremely dangerous. Rather than build my own cairns to mark the twists and turns in these itineraries, I de
cided to play the game by Bedouin rules, relying only on their subtle markers to indicate the way.

  From locals in the nearest village, I learned that the purpose of these Bedouin routes was a simple one: to hunt for the ibex that cavorted in the upper realms of the jebels. It seemed mind-blowing to imagine these crafty hunters stalking and slaying the ibex with bow and arrow, then downclimbing the routes, overhangs and all, with dead prey slung over their shoulders. Later I would read the accounts of the Englishman Tony Howard, who opened the Wadi Rum to climbing after 1984 and made a minor study of these Bedouin routes. Howard rated the hardest moves on these ancient passages at Very Severe, or 5.7 to 5.8. Of one route on a dome called the Rijm Assaf, Howard wrote, “Its crux was a bold pull over an overhang from a tottering Bedouin cairn balanced on the edge of space.” Howard also claimed that one route on Jebel Rum bore the signatures in Thamudic script of hunters named Kharajat and Jahfal. That script was in use only from 200 BC to 300 AD. Thus Howard concluded that the Bedouin climb had taken place as long as two thousand years ago. He went so far as to speculate that it might have been the oldest known rock climb in the world.

  Among the Anasazi, the Tellem, the Chachopoya, the Toraja, the cave diggers of Mustang, and the Bedouin of the Wadi Rum, prehistoric climbing of a high technical level evidently served various purposes, ranging from storing precious grain to commemorating the dead to seeking refuges for meditation to hunting ibex. None of the motives of those cultures bore any resemblance to the Western passion for climbing to achieve personal and aesthetic goals. Yet the severity of the climbing testifies to a commitment to needs both utilitarian and spiritual every bit as intense as the passions that drove Whymper up the Matterhorn or Hillary to the top of Everest.