by Primo Levi
I immediately saw that on high, along the valley’s sides, there were holes in the rock and cascades of rubble: the sign that in these parts too some people were prospecting. But I did not ask any questions to avoid arousing suspicion; a foreigner like myself aroused too much already. I went down to the stream, which was rather swift (I remember that its water was turbid and a dingy white, as if it had been mixed with milk, something which in my parts was unheard of), and I set about patiently examining the stones: this is one of our tricks, the stones in a stream come from afar and speak clearly to him who understands. There was a little of everything: flint stones, green stones, lime stones, granite, iron-bearing stones, even a little of what we call galmeida, all stuff that did not interest me; and yet I had the fixed idea that in a valley formed like that, with certain white striations on the red rock and with so much iron thereabouts, lead rocks could not be missing.
I walked down along the stream, partly on the boulders, partly wading wherever I could, like a hunting dog, with my eyes glued to the ground, when lo and behold! a little below the confluence with another, smaller stream, I saw a stone among millions of other stones, a stone almost the same as all the others, a dingy white stone with small black speckles, which brought me to a halt, tense and motionless, exactly like a hunting dog pointing. I picked it up. It was heavy. Next to it was another like it but smaller. We rarely make mistakes: but just to be sure I crushed it and took a fragment as big as a nut along with me to test it. A good prospector, a serious one, who does not want to tell lies either to others or himself, should not trust in appearances, because the rock, which seems dead, instead is full of deception: sometimes it changes its nature even while you’re digging, like certain snakes that change color so you won’t see them. A good prospector, therefore, carries everything with him: a clay crucible, pieces of charcoal, touchwood and steel, and another instrument that is secret and I can’t mention and is used precisely to find out whether the rock is good or not.
That evening I found an out-of-the-way spot, built a hearth, on which I put the well-layered crucible, heated it for half an hour, and then let it cool. I broke it open and there it was—the shiny heavy little disk which can be scored by your fingernail, which makes your heart leap with joy and the fatigue of the long walk vanish from your legs, and which we call “the little king.”
At this point we are far from finished; on the contrary, most of the work is still to be done. You have to go back up the stream, and at every branching look around to see whether the good stone continues to right or left. I went up for quite a distance along the big stream and the stone was always there but became more and more sparse; then the valley narrowed to a gorge so profound and steep that climbing it was out of the question. I asked the shepherds thereabouts and they gave me to understand by dint of gestures and grunts that there really was no way of getting around that gorge, but if you went back down to the big valley you would find a small road, about so wide, which ran through a pass they called something like Tringo and descended just above the gorge, ending up in a place where there were horned beasts that mooed and therefore (I thought) also grazing land, shepherds, bread, and milk. I started walking, easily found the road and Tringo, and from there went down to a very beautiful country.
Straight in front of me in a long tunnel-like view I saw a valley green with larches, and in the distance mountains white with snow at the height of the summer: the valley ended at my feet in a vast meadow dotted with huts and flocks. I was tired; I walked farther down and stopped by the shepherds. They were distrustful, but they knew (even too well) the value of gold, and they put me up for a few days without bothering me. I took advantage of this to learn a few words of their language—they called mountains “pen,” meadows “tza,” the snow of summer “roisa,” sheep “fea,” their houses “bait,” which are made of rock in the lower part, where they keep the livestock, and of wood above, with stone rests as I have already said, where they live and store hay and provisions. They were cantankerous people, who spoke little, but they had no weapons and did not treat me badly.
When I was rested I resumed my search, still with the stream system, and I wound up slipping into a valley parallel to the larch valley, long, narrow, and deserted, without meadows or woods. The stream which ran through it was rich in good rock: I felt I was close to what I was searching for. It took me three days, sleeping in the open: in fact, without sleeping at all, I was that impatient, passing the night staring at the sky so that dawn would break soon.
The deposit was quite out of the way, in a very steep gully: the white rock cropped out here and there amid sickly grass, within a hand’s reach, and all you had to do was dig two or three feet to find the black rock, the richest of all, which I had never yet seen but which my father had described to me. A compact rock without slag, to put a hundred men to work for a hundred years. What was strange was that someone must have already been there: you could see, half hidden behind a rock (which certainly had been put there on purpose), the opening to a tunnel, which must have been very old, because from its vault hung stalactites as long as my fingers. On the ground there were stakes of rotted wood and a few corroded bone fragments; the rest must have been carried off by the foxes—in fact there were footprints of foxes and perhaps of wolves: but a half skull that protruded from the mud was certainly human. This is a difficult thing to explain, but it has already happened more than once that someone, who knows when, coming from who knows where, at some remote time, perhaps before the Flood, finds a vein, does not say anything to anyone, tries by himself to dig out the rock, leaves his bones there, and then the centuries pass. My father told me that in whatever tunnel or cave you may dig you find the bones of the dead.
In short, the deposit was there: I made my tests, I built as best I could a furnace there in the open, I went down and came back up with wood, I melted down as much lead as I could carry on my back, and I returned to the valley. I didn’t say anything to the people on the pastureland; I continued down the Tringo and came to the large village on the other side, which was called Sales. It was market day, and I put myself on show with my piece of lead in my hand. A few people began to stop, to weigh it and ask me questions, of which I only understood half; it was clear that they wanted to know what it was good for, how much it cost, and where it came from. Then an alert-looking fellow with a plaited woolen cap came up to me, and we understood each other pretty well. I showed him that you could beat that stuff with a hammer: in fact, right there and then I found a hammer and a curbstone and showed him how easy it is to fashion it into slabs and sheets: then I explained to him that with the sheets, welding them on one side with a red-hot iron, you could make pipes. I told him that wooden pipes, for example, the rainpipes in that town Sales, leak and rot; I explained to him that bronze pipes are hard to make and when they are used for drinking water cause stomach trouble, and that instead lead pipes last forever and can be joined together very easily. Putting on a solemn face, I also took a random shot and explained to him that with a sheet of lead you can also line coffins for the dead, so that they don’t grow worms but become dry and thin, and so the soul too is not dispersed, which is a fine advantage; and still with lead you can cast small funeral statues, not shiny like bronze, but in fact a bit dark, a bit subdued, as is suitable to objects of mourning. Since I saw that these matters interested him greatly, I explained that, if one goes beyond appearances, lead is actually the metal of death: because it brings on death, because its weight is a desire to fall, and to fall is a property of corpses, because its very color is dulled-dead, because it is the metal of the planet Tuisto, which is the slowest of the planets, that is, the planet of the dead. I also told him that, in my opinion, lead is a material different from all other materials, a metal which you feel is tired, perhaps tired of transforming itself and that does not want to transform itself anymore: the ashes of who knows how many other elements full of life, which thousands upon thousands of years ago were burned in their own fire. These a
re things I really think; it is not that I invented them to close the deal. That man, whose name was Borvio, listened to all this with his mouth agape, and then he told me that it really must be as I said, and that that planet is sacred to a god who in his town was called Saturn and is depicted with a scythe. This was the moment to get down to brass tacks, and while he was still there mulling over my blandishments, I asked him for thirty pounds of gold for handing over the deposit, the technique of smelting the lead, and precise instructions on the principal uses of the metal. He made me a counter offer of bronze coins with a boar imprinted on them, coined God knows where, but I made the motion of spitting on them: gold, and cut the nonsense. Anyway, thirty pounds are too much for someone traveling on foot, everyone knows that, and I knew that Borvio knew it: so we concluded the deal for twenty pounds. He insisted that I accompany him to the deposit, which was only right. When we got back to the valley, he gave me the gold: I checked all twenty ingots, found them genuine and of good weight, and we got beautifully drunk on wine to celebrate.
It was also a farewell drunk. It is not that that country did not please me, but many reasons impelled me to continue my journey. First: I wanted to see the warm countries, where they say olives and lemons grow. Second: I wanted to see the sea, not the stormy sea from which came my ancestor with the blue teeth, but the tepid sea, from which comes salt. Third: there’s no point in having gold and carrying it on your back, with the continuous terror that at night or during a drinking bout someone will steal it from you. Fourth, and to sum up: I wanted to spend the gold on a sea voyage, to get to know the sea and sailors, because sailors need lead, even if they do not know it.
So I left: I walked for two months, descending a large sad valley until it opened out on a plain. There were meadows and wheatfields and a sharp smell of burnt brushwood which filled me with nostalgia for my country: autumn, in all the countries of the world, has the same smell of dead leaves, of resting earth, of bundles of burning branches, in short, of things which are ending, and you think “forever.” I came across a fortified city—there are none as large back home—at the confluence of two rivers; there was a market fair with slaves, meats, wine; filthy, solid, disheveled girls; a tavern with a good fire—and I spent the winter there: it snowed as it does back home. I left in March, and after a month of walking I found the sea, which was not blue but gray, bellowed like a bison, and hurled itself on the land as though it wanted to devour it: at the thought that it never rested, never had rested since the beginning of the world, my courage failed me. But I still continued down the road to the east, along the beach, because the sea fascinated me and I could not tear myself away from it.
I found another city, and I stopped there, also because my gold was beginning to come to an end. They were fishermen and strange folk, who came by ship from various, very distant countries: they bought and sold; at night they fought over the women and knifed each other in the alleyways. Then I too bought a heavy knife made of bronze in a leather sheath, to carry tied to my waist under my clothes. They knew gloss but not mirrors; that is, they only had small mirrors of polished bronze, cheap things, the kind that get scratched immediately and distort the colors. If you have lead it is not difficult to make a glass mirror, but I made a fuss about parting with the secret, I told them that it is an art which only we Rodmunds know, that a goddess named Frigga taught it to us, and other foolishness which they swallowed hook, line, and sinker.
I needed money: I looked around me, found near the port a glazier who seemed rather intelligent, and made a deal with him.
From him I learned several things—first of all, that glass can be blown: I liked that system a great deal, and I even had him teach it to me, and one day or another I will also try to blow lead or melted bronze (but they are too liquid, I doubt whether I’ll succeed). I, however, taught him that on a still-hot pane of glass you can pour melted lead and obtain mirrors not so large but luminous, without flaws, which last for many years. He in fact was rather adept: he had a secret for making colored glass and fashioned variegated glass panes that were beautiful to look at. I was full of enthusiasm for the collaboration and invented a process of making mirrors also with the rounded caps of blown glass, pouring the lead into it or spreading it on the outside: if you looked into them you see yourself either very large or very small, or even all crooked: these mirrors are not liked by women, but all children insist on getting them. Through the summer and fall we sold mirrors to the merchants, who paid well for them; but meanwhile I was talking with them and tried to gather as much information as I could on a region which many of them knew.
It was astounding to see how those people, who actually spent half their lives on the sea, had such confused notions about the cardinal points and distances; but, in short, on one point they were all agreed: that is, that by sailing south, some said a thousand miles, others said ten times farther than that, you came to a land which the sun had burnt to dust, rich in unusual trees and animals, and inhabited by ferocious men with black skin. But many stated as a certainty that halfway along you encountered a large island called Icnusa, which was the island of metals: they told the strangest stories about this island, which was inhabited by giants, whereas the horses, oxen, even rabbits and chickens were tiny; that the women gave orders and fought the wars, while the men watched over the livestock and spun the wool; that these giants were devourers of men, especially foreigners; that it was a land of utter whoredom, where the husbands exchanged wives and even the animals coupled haphazardly, wolves with cats, bears with cows; that the women’s period of pregnancy lasted only three days, then the women gave birth and immediately told the infant: “Get moving, bring me the scissors and turn on the light, so I can cut your umbilical cord.” Still others said that along its coasts there are fortresses built of rock, big as mountains; that everything on that island is made of rock—the points of the spears, the wheels of the wagons, even the women’s combs and sewing needles: also the pots to cook with, and that they actually have stones which burn and they set them alight under these pots; that along their roads, to guard the crossroads, there are petrified monsters frightening to look at. I listened to all these things with a grave face, but within myself I was laughing loud enough to burst, because by now I have roamed the world enough and know that all is just like your hometown: for the rest, I too, when I get back and tell stories about the countries I’ve been in, amuse myself by inventing weird tales; indeed, here they tell fantastic stories about my country—for example, that our buffalo do not have knees and all you have to do to slaughter them is saw through the trees against which they lean at night to rest: their weight breaks the tree; they fall down and cannot get up again.
As to metals, however, they were all in agreement: many merchants and sea captains had brought loads of raw or finished metal from the island to land, but they were crude folk and from their accounts it was hard to understand what metal they were referring to; also because not all spoke the same language and no one spoke mine, and there was a great confusion of terms. They said, for example, “kalibe” and there was absolutely no way to figure out whether they meant iron, silver, or bronze. Others called “sider” either iron or ice, and they were so ignorant as to insist that the ice in the mountains, with the passing of the centuries and beneath the weight of the rock, hardens and first becomes rock crystal and later iron-bearing rock.
To put it bluntly, I was fed up with these female occupations and wanted to go and see this Icnusa. I handed over to the glazier my share in the business, and with that money, plus the money I had made from the mirrors, I got passage on board a cargo ship; but you don’t leave in the winter, there is the north wind, or the west wind, or the south wind, or the southwest wind—in brief, it appears that no wind is good, and that until April the best thing is to stay on land, get drunk, bet your shirt on the dice games, and get some girl in the port pregnant.
We left in April. The ship was loaded with jugs of wine; besides the owner there was the crew chief,
four sailors, and twenty rowers chained to their benches. The crew chief came from Kriti and was a big liar: he told stories about a country where there lived men called Big Ears, who have ears so huge that they wrap themselves in them to sleep in the winter, and about animals called Alfil with tails in the front who understand the language of men.
I must confess that I had trouble accustoming myself to life aboard ship: it dances under your feet, leans a bit to the right and a bit to the left, it is hard to eat and sleep, and you step on each other’s feet due to the lack of space; besides, the chained rowers stare at you with such ferocious eyes as to make you think that, if they weren’t in fact chained, they would tear you to pieces in a flash: and the owner told me that sometimes it happens. On the other hand, when the wind is favorable, the sail billows out, the rowers lift their oars, and you think you are flying in an enchanted silence; you see dolphins leap out of the water, and the sailors claim that they can discover, from the expression on their snouts the weather we will have the next day. That ship was well plastered with pitch and yet the entire keel was riddled with holes; they were ship worms, they explained. In port, too, I had seen that all the moored ships were worm-eaten: there was nothing to be done, said the owner, who was also the captain. When the ship is old, it’s broken up and burnt; but I had an idea, and the same for the anchor. It’s stupid to make it out of iron; the rust devours it, and it doesn’t last two years. And fishing nets? Those sailors, when the wind is good, dropped a net that had wooden floats and rocks as ballast. Rocks! If they had been lead they could have been four times less cumbersome. Of course I did not say a word to anyone, but—as you too will understand—I was already thinking of the lead I would dig out of Icnusa’s entrails, and I was selling the bearskin before I had shot the bear.