by Primo Levi
We came in sight of the island after eleven days at sea. We entered a small harbor by rowing; around us there were granite cliffs and slaves who were carving columns. They were not giants and they did not sleep in their own ears; they were made like us and communicated well enough with the sailors, but their guards did not let them speak. This was a land of rocks and wind, which I liked on sight: the air was full of the smell of herbs, bitter and wild, and the people seemed strong and simple.
The land of metals was two days’ walk away: I hired a donkey with a driver, and this is actually true, they are small donkeys (though not like cats, as they say on the mainland) but robust and tough; in short, in all rumors there may be some truth, perhaps a truth hidden beneath veils of words, like a riddle. For example, I saw that the story of the rock fortresses was quite correct; they are not as big as mountains, but solid, regular in shape, with hewn stones fitted together with precision. And what is curious is that everyone says that “they have always been there,” and nobody knows by whom, how, why, and when they were built. That the islanders devour foreigners, however, is a great lie. Going in stages they led me to the mine without making any difficulties or indulging in mysteries, as if their land belonged to everyone.
The land of metals is enough to make you drunk, as happens when a hound enters a wood full of game and jumps from scent to scent, shivering all over and going half crazy.
It is near the sea, a line of hills which on high become rocky crags, and near and far, all the way to the horizon, one sees plumes of smoke from the foundries, surrounded by people working, free and slaves: and the story of the stone that burns is also true; I could scarcely believe my eyes. It doesn’t catch fire easily, but then it produces a great deal of heat and lasts for a long time. They brought it there from God knows where, in baskets on donkeys’ backs—it is black, greasy, fragile, and not very heavy.
So, as I was saying, there are marvelous stones, certainly heavy with metals never seen, which surface in white, violet, and blue streaks: beneath that land there must be a fabulous tracery of veins. I would willingly have lost myself in it, tapping, digging, and testing; but I am a Kodmund, and my rock is lead. I immediately set to work.
I found a deposit on the country’s western border, where I believe nobody had ever searched: in fact, there were no pits, nor tunnels, nor heaps of rubble, and there weren’t even any signs on the surface; the rocks on the surface were like all the other rocks. But just below, the lead was there: and this is a thing of which I had often thought, that we prospectors believe we find the metal with our eyes, experience, and skill, but in reality what guides is something more profound, a force like that which guides the salmon to go back up our rivers, or the swallows to return to the nest. Perhaps it happens with us as with the water diviners, who do not know what guides them to the water, but something does guide them and twists the wand in their hands.
I can’t say how, but right there was the lead: I felt it under my feet, turbid, poisonous, and heavy, stretching for two miles along a brook in a wood where wild bees nest in the lightning-struck tree trunks. In a short time I had bought slaves who dug for me, and as soon as I had laid aside a bit of money I also bought myself a woman. Not just to have a good time: I chose her carefully, not looking so much for beauty but rather that she be healthy, wide in the hips, young, and merry. I chose her like that, so that she gives me a Rodmund, and our art does not perish; and I haven’t been behindhand, because my hands and knees have begun to shake, and my teeth are loose in my gums and have turned blue like those of my ancestor who came from the sea. This Rodmund will be born at the end of the coming winter, in this land where palms grow, salt condenses, and at night you can hear the wild dogs baying on the track of a bear. In this village I have founded near the brook of the wild bees, and to which I would have liked to give a name in my language, which I am forgetting, Bak der Binnen, meaning “Brook of the Bees”: but the people here have accepted the name only in part, and among themselves, in their language, which by now is mine, they call it Bacu Abis.
MERCURY
With my wife, Maggie, I the undersigned Corporal Abrahams have lived on this island for fourteen years. I had been sent here as garrison: it seems that on a nearby island (I mean to say “the nearest”: it is northeast from this one, not less than 1,200 miles, and is called St. Helena) was exiled an important and dangerous person, and it was feared that his supporters might help him to escape and take shelter down here. This is a story which I have never believed: my island is called Desolation, and never was an island’s name better chosen; so I could never understand what such an important person would come looking for here.
The rumor went around that he was a renegade, an adulterer, a Papist, rabble-rouser, and braggart. As long as he was alive, there were with us another twelve soldiers, young, merry fellows, from Wales and Surrey; they were also good farmers and gave us a hand in the work. Then the rabble-rouser died, and after that a gunboat came to take us all home: but Maggie and I remembered certain old debts and preferred to remain here to watch over our pigs. Our island has the shape you can see below.
It is the loneliest island in the world. It was discovered more than once, by the Portuguese, the Dutch, and even before that by savages who carved signs and idols in the rocks of Mount Snowdon; but nobody has ever stayed on, because it rains here half the year and the soil is good only for sorghum and potatoes. Nevertheless, those who are not choosy certainly won’t die of hunger, because the northern coast for five months of the year swarms with seals, and the two small islands to the south are full of seagulls’ nests: all you have to do is get a boat and you can find as many eggs as you want. They taste of fish, but they are nourishing and kill your hunger; everything here tastes of fish, even the potatoes and the pigs who eat them.
On the slopes east of Snowdon grow holm oaks and other trees whose names I do not know: in the autumn they bloom with light blue, fleshy flowers that smell like unwashed people; in the winter, hard, sour berries, not good to eat. They are strange trees: they suck up water from the deep earth and throw it up in rain from the tops of their branches; even on dry days, the land beneath this forest is humid. The water that pours down from the branches is good to drink, and indeed has a soothing effect on inflammations, although it tastes of moss: we gather it with a system of gutters and basins. This forest, which, in fact, is the only one on the island, we called the Weeping Forest.
We live at Aberdare. It is not a town—there are only four wooden huts, two of which are caved in; but one of the Welshmen insisted on calling it that, since he himself came from Aberdare. Duckbill is the island’s northernmost point: the soldier Cochrane, who suffered from homesickness, went there often and spent whole days amid the salty mist and wind because it seemed to him that he was closer to England. (He also built a beacon there, which nobody ever bothered to light.) It is called Duckbill because, when seen from the east, it really has the shape of a duck’s bill.
Seal Island is flat and sandy; the seals go there in the winter to have their pups. Holywell Cave was given that name by my wife, and I don’t know what she saw in it. At certain periods, when we were alone, she went there almost every night, with a torch, even though it was almost two miles from Aberdare. She would sit there to spin or knit, waiting for God knows what. I asked her about it more than once: she told me some confused things, that she heard voices and saw shadows, and that down there, where not even the thunder of the sea reached, she felt less alone and more protected.
I, however, feared that Maggie was leaning toward idolatry. In that cave there were boulders that looked like figures of men and animals; one boulder, right in the back, was a horned skull. Certainly these shapes were not made by human hands: and so who did them? I, on my account, preferred to give them a wide berth; also because in the cave one sometimes heard stifled rumbles, like attacks of colic in the earth’s entrails, the floor was hot under your feet, and from certain fissures in the back came jets of steam with a sulfuro
us smell. In short, I would have given an entirely different name to that cave: but Maggie said that the voice she claimed to hear would one day pronounce our fate, and the island’s and all humanity’s.
Maggie and I remained alone for several years; each year, at Easter, Burton’s whaler would pass by bringing news of the world and provisions and take on the small amount of smoked pork that we had produced; but then everything changed. Three years ago Burton set ashore here two Dutchmen: Willem was still nearly a child, shy, blond, and pink-skinned; on his forehead he had a silvery sore which looked like leprosy and no ship wanted him aboard. Hendrik was older; he was thin and had gray hair and a wrinkled brow: he told a not very clear story of a brawl in which he supposedly bashed in his quartermaster’s head, and the gallows was waiting for him in Holland; but he did not speak like a sailor and had gentleman’s hands, not the hands of someone who bashes in heads. One morning a few months later we saw smoke rise from one of the Egg Islands. I took the boat and went over to look. I found two shipwrecked Italians, Gaetano of Amalfi and Andrea of Noli. Their ship had split on the Plowshare rocks, and they had swum to safety; they did not know that the large island was inhabited; they had lit a fire of brushwood and guano to dry off. I told them that in a few months Burton would pass by again and he could land them in Europe, but they refused with terror. After what they had seen that night, never again would they set foot on a ship; and it took a great deal of persuading on my part to convince them to come on my small boat and cross the hundred yards of sea that separated us from Desolation. As far as they were concerned, they would have stayed on that miserable rock eating seagulls’ eggs until their natural death.
Not that Desolation lacks for space. I put up the four men in one of the huts abandoned by the Welshmen; they had quite enough room, also because their luggage was modest. Only Hendrik had a wooden trunk, closed with a lock. Willem’s sore was not leprosy at all; Maggie cured it in a few weeks with compresses of an herb she knows—it is not actually watercress, it’s a succulent herb which grows at the borders of the forest and is good to eat, even if then it gives you strange dreams: but we call it watercress. To tell the truth, she did not only treat him with compresses: she shut herself up with him in the bedroom and sang him chants like lullabies, with pauses that seemed to me too long. I was glad and less worried when Willem was cured, but immediately after began another annoying business with Hendrik. He and Maggie took long walks together, and I heard them talk about the seven keys, Hermes Trismegistus, the union of contraries, and other rather obscure matters. Hendrik built himself a sturdy hut without windows, put his trunk in it, and spent whole days there, sometimes with Maggie: you could see smoke rising out of the chimney. They would also go to the cave and return with colored stones, which Hendrik called “cinnabars.”
The two Italians worried me less. They too looked at Maggie with shining eyes, but they did not know English and could not talk with her. What’s more, they were jealous of each other and spent their days keeping an eye on each other. Andrea was very devout, and in a short time had filled the island with saints made of wood and baked clay: he had given a terracotta Madonna as a gift to Maggie, who, however, did not know what to do with it and put it in a corner of the kitchen. In short, it would have been clear to anyone that these four men needed four women. One day I brought them all together and without beating around the bush told them that if one of them touched Maggie he would end up in Hell, because one should not lust after another man’s woman: but I would send him there myself, at the cost of ending up there too. When Burton came by again, with his hold brimming with whale oil, all of us in agreement solemnly commissioned him with the task of finding four wives, but he laughed in our faces. What did we think? That it was easy to find women ready to settle down among the seals, on this forgotten island, to marry four good-for-nothings? Perhaps if we paid them, but with what? Certainly not with our sausages, half pig and half seal, which stank of fish more than his whaler. He left and immediately after hoisted his sails.
That very evening, just before nightfall, we heard a great rumble of thunder, as though the island itself was being shaken to its roots. In a few minutes the sky darkened and the black cloud that covered it was lit from below as by a fire. From the top of Mount Snowdon we saw first rapid red flashes leap out and climb up into the sky, then a broad, slow stream of burning lava: it did not descend toward us but to the left, the south, pouring from ridge to ridge, hissing and crackling. After an hour it reached the sea and there it was doused with a roar, lifting up a column of vapor. None of us had ever thought that Mount Snowdon could be a volcano; and yet the shape of its summit, with a round hollow at least two hundred feet deep, could have made us suspect this.
The spectacle continued all through the night, calming down every so often, then picking up again with a new series of explosions; it seemed that it would never end. Yet, toward dawn, a hot wind blew from the east, the sky cleared off again, and the uproar gradually died down until it was reduced to a murmur, then silence. The mantle of lava, which had been yellow and dazzling, turned reddish like smoldering coals, and by daylight it was extinguished.
My preoccupation was the pigs. I told Maggie that she should go to sleep, and asked the four men to come with me; I wanted to see what had changed on the island.
Nothing had happened to the pigs, but they ran to meet us like brothers (I can’t stand people who speak badly of pigs: they arc animals who are quite conscious, and it pains me when I have to slaughter them). On the northeastern slope several cracks had opened, two large ones whose bottoms cannot be seen. The south-western edge of the Weeping Forest was buried, and the strip alongside for a breadth of two hundred feet was dried out and had caught fire; the earth must have been hotter than the sky, because the fire followed the trunks all the way to the roots, scooping out passages where they had been. The mantle of lava was all dotted I with burst bubbles with edges as sharp as splinters of glass, and it looked like a gigantic cheese grater: it issued from the southern lip of the crater, which had collapsed, while the northern lip, which formed the top of the mountain, was now a rounded crest that seemed much higher than before.
When we looked into the Holywell Cave we were petrified with astonishment. It was another cave, completely different, as when one shuffles a deck of cards—narrow where before it had been broad, high where it had been low: at one point the ceiling had collapsed and the stalactites instead of pointing down now pointed sideways, like storks’ beaks. At the rear, where before there had been the Devil’s Skull, there was now an enormous chamber, like the dome of a church, still full of smoke and crackling sounds, so much so that Andrea and Gaetano wanted at all costs to turn back. I sent them to call Maggie so that she too would come and see her cave, and, as I expected, Maggie arrived gasping from the run and emotion, and the two Italians stayed outside, presumably to pray to their saints and to say their litanies. Inside the cave Maggie ran back and forth like a hunting dog, as if those voices she said she heard were calling to her; suddenly she let out a scream which made all our hairs stand on end. There was in the sky of the cupola a crack, and drops were falling from it, but not of water: shiny, heavy drops, which plunked on the rock floor and burst into a thousand spattering drops that rolled far away. A little lower down a pool had formed, and then we understood that it was mercury: Hendrik touched it, and I did too: it was a cold, lively material, which moved in small, irritated, and frenetic waves.
Hendrik seemed transfigured. He exchanged swift glances with Maggie whose significance I could not catch, and he said some obscure, mixed-up things to us, which, however, she seemed to understand: that it was time to initiate the Great Work; that, like the sky, the earth too has its dew; that the cave was full of the spiritus mundi. Then he turned openly to Maggie and said to her: “Come here this evening; we will make the beast with two backs.” He took from his neck a chain with a bronze cross and showed it to us: on the cross a snake was crucified, and he threw the cross on the mercury
in the pool, and the cross floated.
If you looked around, mercury was oozing from all the cracks of the new cave, like beer from new vats. If you listened you heard a sonorous murmur, produced by thousands of metallic droplets which fell from the cave’s vault and splattered on the ground, and by the sound of the trickles vibrating, like melted silver, before sinking in the crevices in the rock floor.
To tell the truth, I had never liked Hendrik—of the four men, he was the one I liked the least; but at that moment he filled me with fear, rage, and revulsion. He had a crooked, fleeting light in his eyes, like that of mercury; it seemed that he had turned into mercury, that it was running in his veins and shone through his eyes. He scurried about the cave like a ferret, dragging Maggie by the wrist, plunging his hands into the pools of mercury, spraying it over himself and pouring it on his head, as a thirsty man would do with water: one step more and he might have drunk it. Maggie followed him, spellbound. I stood it for a while, then I flipped open my knife, grabbed him by the chest, and pushed him against the rock wall: I am much stronger than he is, and he went slack like a sail when the wind drops. I wanted to know who he was, what he wanted of us and the island, and what about that business of the beast with two backs.