Part 5 (1/2)
Time had stuffed Peking man, and all his pomps and works, down a red fissure in a blue cave wall at Zhoukoudian. Fossils crammed the red fissure. The team called the skull's first owner Peking man. His species was h.o.m.o erectus.
The team originally found the Zhoukoudian cave by questioning a big-city pharmacist. Many old folk in China drink suspended fossil-bone powders as elixirs-so-called dragon's teeth; consequently, paleontologists for two generations have checked Chinese pharmacies and asked, ”Where did these bones come from?” Shopping for fossils, a specialist recognized an ancient human tooth. His inquiry led to the caves at Zhoukoudian-Dragon Bone Hill.
Teilhard hauled his camp cot from Peking, lived with Chinese villagers, and directed the dig. Over the years he sorted and eventually named the fissures' animal bones. He discovered bones from saber-toothed tigers, ostriches, horses, a large camel, buffalo, wild sheep, rhinos, hyenas, and ”a large and a small bear.” Ultimately, and spectacularly, he was able to date Peking man in the Pleistocene. He established the date by many methods, one of which was interesting: Among the bits of debris under, around, and above various layers of Peking man's bones and tools were skulls, whole or in fragments, of mole rats. He undertook his own study of the mole rats' evolving skulls, dated them, and so helped confirm Peking man's dates.
The team dug further into the immensities of the Zhoukoudian caves; for ten years they excavated, for eight months a year. Teilhard retrieved five more human skulls, twelve lower jaws, and scattered teeth. It was his major life's work.
During those ten years, squinting and laughing furrowed his face. His temples dipped as his narrow skull bones emerged. When he could not get Gauloises, he smoked Jobs. Daily he said the Divine Office-the liturgy, mostly psalms, that is the prayer of the Catholic (and Anglican and Episcopal) church. A British historian who knew him described his ”kindly and ironic grace,” his ”sharp and yet benevolent refinement.”
In all those years, he found no skeletons. When colleagues worldwide praised him for the discoveries, Teilhard spoke with modesty and exasperation: ”Heads,” he said, ”practically nothing but heads.” Paleontologists from all over the world are again-seventy years later, after several decades' chaos halted the work-finding hominid bones, and choppers and stone flakes, in the Zhoukoudian caves.
Peking man and his people walked upright: with limbs like ours they made fire and stone tools. That land was jungly then. They ate mostly venison and hackberries. They hunted elephants, tigers, and boars. They lived before water filled the Great Lakes and the Florida peninsula lifted from the sea, while camels and mastodons grazed in North America. They lived before two great ages when ice covered Scandinavia and Canada, as well as the British Isles, northern Germany, and the northern United States: they lived before the Atlantic Ocean drowned eastern North America between glaciations. Their human species is extinct, like the Neanderthals'.
Most paleontologists believe that we-we humans in the form of h.o.m.o erectus-left Africa ninety thousand years ago by walking up the Great Rift Valley, generation after generation, to the valley's end at the Sea of Galilee. Recent, much older erectus finds in Java, China, and the Republic of Georgia seem to show, however, that our generations started leaving Africa about a million years earlier-unless humans arose in Asia. The new ancient dates jolt paleontologists, who one might expect would be accustomed to this sort of thing by now-this repeated knocking out the back wall, this eerie old light on the peopled landscape.
Whenever we made our move, we did not rush to Corfu like sensible people. Instead we carried our cupped fires into the lands we now call the Levant, and then seriatim into China, j.a.pan, and Indonesia, whence we hopped islands clear to Australia. There, on a rock shelter, we engraved animals twice as long ago as we painted cave walls in France. People-including erectus-plied Asian islands thousands of years before Europe saw any humans who could think of such a thing as a raft.
”However far back we look into the past,” Teilhard said, ”we see the waves of the multiple breaking into foam.”
During the violence and famine the j.a.panese invasion of China caused, that first Peking man skull disappeared from the Chinese museum. Scientists suspect starving locals pulverized and drank it. There is a plaster cast of this skull, as there is of every bit of bone and tooth-forty people's remains-that the team found by working the site for all those years. The plaster casts proved handy, since every single one of the Peking man bones, crate after crate, disappeared in World War II. Scientists cached the crates with a U.S. Marine doctor, who tried to carry them back as luggage. The j.a.panese caught him. Before he went to prison he was able to entrust the crates to European officials and Chinese friends. He left prison four years later, when the war ended; the crates had disappeared. Recent searches draw blanks.
The man of the red earths, Teilhard called Peking man. And of Christianity he said, ”We have had too much talk of sheep. I want to see the lions come out.”
C H I N A When Emperor Qin was thirty-one years old, a rival prince sent him an envoy bearing routine regal gifts: a severed head and a map. The envoy also bore a poisoned dagger in his sleeve. The comedy played itself out: When the a.s.sa.s.sin grabbed the emperor's sleeve and drew the dagger, the sleeve tore off. The emperor found his dress sword too long to draw. He dashed behind a pillar. His courtiers gaped. The court doctor beaned the a.s.sailant with a medicine bag. The emperor ran around and around the pillar. Someone yelled to the emperor that he could draw his sword if he tilted its length behind him. He tried that, and it worked; he slashed the a.s.sa.s.sin's thigh. The a.s.sa.s.sin threw his dagger; it hit the pillar. The emperor and his courtiers finished him off.
Seven years later, someone tried to kill the emperor with a lead-filled harp. The next year someone tried to ambush his carriage; the hapless a.s.sa.s.sin attacked the wrong carriage.
Emperor Qin was almost forty by then, and getting nervous. Surely power and wealth could secure immortality? At that time, intelligence held that immortality, while elusive like a treasure or a bird, could enter some people's hands if they sought it mightily and used all means. The emperor sacrificed to mountains and rivers; he walked beaches, looking for immortals. He sent scholars to search for a famous Taoist master who had foiled death by eating a flower. No one could find him.
Taoist monks, then and now, run medical laboratories. The emperor ordered the monks to brew a batch of immortality elixir, under pain of death. Consequently, they took those pains. Again, it was common knowledge that immortal people lived on three Pacific islands, where they drank a concoction that proofed their bodies against time. The emperor sent a fleet of s.h.i.+ps to find the islands and fetch the philter. Many months later, the expedition's captain returned. He knew he faced death for failing. He told the emperor he had actually met an immortal, who, alas, would not release the philter without the gift of many young people and craftsmen. The emperor complied. Away sailed the same canny captain with many s.h.i.+ps bearing three thousand skilled and comely young people. They never returned. A widely known Chinese legend claims they colonized j.a.pan.
Foiled, the emperor concluded that a court enemy must be jinxing his immortality project. He purged the court and concealed his movements. He owned 270 palaces; now he built secret tunnels, routes, and walkways among them; he crept about under heavy guard. He killed informers and all their families. Once, a meteorite fell in a far-flung area of his empire. A local wag whose sense of occasion was poor wrote on the meteorite the witty taunt, ”After Qin s.h.i.+h-huang-ti's death the land will be divided.” Emperor Qin easily pounded the stone to powder; it took longer to kill all that region's inhabitants.
He had already spared some thought for death's big blank by the time he was thirteen. It was then that he drafted seven hundred thousand men to start building his mausoleum, an underground palace he hoped to illuminate like the colorful earth above, using long-burning whale-oil lamps. Workers dug through three underground streams and carved a wide vault, in which they formed and painted a miniature world. On the ceiling above the emperor's ready copper coffin, they painted the heavens and set constellations. The Milky Way, the source of the Yellow River, they daubed in dots. From the stars the Yellow River fell. Quicksilver in rivulets mimicked the Yellow and all the realm's great rivers; the liquid actually flowed, mechanically, and emptied into a model of the gleaming ocean. Artists built palaces and towers to scale. They rigged automatic crossbows to shoot grave robbers. They pasted jewels over everything.
Many years later, Emperor Qin died. During his funeral, while his pallbearers threaded the maze of the tomb to the hidden sepulchre, soldiers outside sealed the great jade door. They buried the pallbearers alive because they alone (who had possibly lost a civil service lottery) knew a way into the tomb's depths. They heaped dirt over the whole mausoleum, jade door and all. Then they planted a gra.s.sy orchard so the tumulus looked like a hill.
You do not find the dead emperor of China something of a clown, do you, because he liked it here and wanted to stay? Because he loved, say, the loam but did not care to join it?
The dying generations, Yeats called the human array, the very large array. We turn faster than disks on a harrow, than blades on a reaper. Time: You can't chock the wheels. We sprout, ripen, fall, and roll under the turf again at a stroke: Surely, the people is gra.s.s. We lay us out in rows; hay rakes gather us in. Chinese peasants sow and reap over the emperor's tomb-generations of them, those Chinese peasants! I saw them, far away. The plow turns under the Chinese peasants where they stand in the field like stalks. Any traveler to any land remarks it: They live like that endlessly, over there. Generation after generation of them lives and dies, over there.
Digging last week in the backyard of our house-in the fresh gra.s.s at the cutting edge of the present in a changed wind, under that morning's clouds-a worker and I surprised two toy soldiers eight feet down.
The early Amish in this country used to roll their community's dead bodies in wraps of sod before they buried them. We are food, like rolled sandwiches, for the Greek G.o.d Chronos, time, who eats his children.
Albert Goldbarth: ”Let the Earth stir her dead.”
The Scotch-Irish in the Appalachians once buried their dead with a platter of salt on their stomachs, signifying the soul's immortality. A rich and long-gone people, I read once, buried their dead after lifting their tongues and dropping jewels into the hollows. The reason for this is unknown.
Mao Tse-tung took novocaine injections to prolong life and virility. His wife, the notorious Jiang Qing, similarly took blood transfusions from-according to Mao's doctor-”healthy young soldiers.” Like Emperor Qin, Mao believed that the best immortality elixir was the secretion of women's bodies. The more he dipped into this wellspring, the longer he would live, so he dipped.
As his fears grew, Mao kept moving-within his secret palace and all over the country. When he hopped a train, all traffic on that line halted; his pa.s.sage fouled rail schedules for a week. Soldiers cleared all the stations, and security guards dressed up to pose as vendors. When Mao slept, the train stopped. He was addicted to barbiturates. He thought someone poisoned one of his swimming pools. He thought someone else poisoned a Nanchang guesthouse where he stayed.
”Jade water,” the Aztecs called human blood. They fed it-hundreds of living sacrifices a day-to the sun. This, the only nourishment the sun G.o.d would take, helped him battle the stars. Daily, blood worked its magic: Daily, morning overcame night. The Aztecs likely knew, as the old Chinese knew, the unrelated oddity that dissolving bodies stain jade; jade absorbs bodies' fluids in rusty, b.l.o.o.d.y-looking spots.
On the day of the dead, according to Ovid, the Romans sacrificed to a G.o.ddess who was mute: Tacitas. She was a fish with its mouth sewn shut.
C L O U D S One day in January, 1942, just after the United States entered World War II, men and women in Athens saw from the base of the Acropolis an ”immense structure of c.u.mulus cloud rising out of the Peloponnese.” To the east lay ”an undercloud, floating like a detached lining.” Does it matter to you, or to the world of time, which of the two you feel yourself to resemble, the ”immense structure” or the ”undercloud”?
”The world is G.o.d's body,” Teilhard said. ”G.o.d draws it ever upwards.”
How to live? ”The only worthwhile joy,” Teilhard wrote in one of his thoughtful, outrageous p.r.o.nouncements, is ”to release some infinitesimal quant.i.ty of the absolute, to free one fragment of being, forever.” Living well is ”cooperating as one individual atom in the final establishment of a world: and ultimately nothing else can mean anything to me.” Is either-releasing a bit of the absolute, or cooperating to establish a world-preferable, or enough, or too much?
On the northeastern coast of Trinidad, during an afternoon in the 1950s, Archie Carr, the green-turtle biologist, lay in a hammock and watched ”little round wind clouds” over the Caribbean Sea and ”towering pearly land clouds” over Tobago.
N U M B E R S Another dated wave: In northeast j.a.pan, a seismic sea wave killed 27,000 people on June 15, 1896. Do not fail to distinguish this infamous day from April 30, 1991, when typhoon waves drowned 138,000 Banglades.h.i.+.
On the dry Laetoli plain of northern Tanzania, Mary Leakey found a trail of hominid footprints. The three barefoot people-likely a short man and woman and child Australopithecus-walked closely together. They walked on moist volcanic tuff and ash. We have a record of those few seconds from a day about 3.6 million years ago-before hominids even chipped stone tools. More ash covered the footprints and hardened like plaster. Ash also preserved the pockmarks of the raindrops that fell beside the three who walked: it was a rainy day. We have almost ninety feet of the three's steady footprints intact. We do not know where they were going or why. We do not know why the woman paused and turned left, briefly, before continuing. ”A remote ancestor,” Leakey said, ”experienced a moment of doubt.” Possibly they watched the Sadiman volcano erupting, or they took a last look back before they left. We do know we cannot make anything so lasting as these three barefoot ones did.
After archaeologists studied this long strip of ground for several years, they buried it to save it. Along one preserved portion, however, new tree roots are already cracking the footprints, and in another place winds threaten to sand them flat; the preservers did not cover them deeply enough. Now they are burying them again.
After these three hominids walked in the rain, an interval of decades, centuries, thousands of years, and millions of years pa.s.sed before Peking man and other erectus people lived on earth. That stretch of time lasted eight times longer than the few hundred thousand years between Peking man's time and ours. Exactly halfway into the interval (1.8 million years ago), recent and controversial dating puts h.o.m.o erectus in Java.
Jeremiah, walking toward Jerusalem, saw the smoke from the Temple's blaze. He wept; he saw the blood of the slain. ”He put his face close to the ground and saw the footprints of sucklings and infants who were walking into captivity” in Babylon. He kissed the footprints.
Who were these individuals? Who were the three who walked together and left footprints in the rain? Who was the gilled baby-the one with the waggly tail? Who was the Baal Shem Tov, who taught, danced, and dug clay? He survived among the children of exiles whose footprints on the bare earth Jeremiah kissed. Centuries later, Emperor Hadrian destroyed another such son of exile, Rabbi Akiva, in Rome. Russian Christians and European Christians alike tried to wipe all those survivors of children of exile from the ground of the earth as a man wipes a plate-survivors of exiles whose footprints on the ground we might well kiss, and whose feet.
Who and of what import were the men whose bones bulk the Great Wall, the thirty million Mao starved, or the thirty million children not yet five who die each year now? Why, they are the insignificant others, of course; living or dead, they are just some of the plentiful others. A newborn slept in a sh.e.l.l of aluminum foil; a Dutchman watched a crab in the desert; a punch-drunk airport skycap joined me for a cigarette. And you? To what end were we billions of oddb.a.l.l.s born?
Which of all these people are still alive? You are alive; that is certain. We living men and women address one another confident that we share members.h.i.+p in the same elite minority club and cohort, the now-living. As I write this I am still alive, but of course I might well have died before you read it. The Dutch traveler has likely not yet died his death, nor the porter. The baked-potato baby is probably not yet pus.h.i.+ng up daisies. The one you love?
The Chinese soldiers who breathed air posing for their seven thousand individual clay portraits must have thought it a wonderful difference, that workers buried only their simulacra then, so their sons could bury their flesh a bit later. One wonders what they did in the months or years they gained. One wonders what one is, oneself, up to these days.
Was it wisdom Mao Tse-tung attained when-like Ted Bundy, who defended himself by pointing out that there are ”so many people”-he awakened to the long view?
”China has many people,” Mao told Nehru in 1954. ”The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of.... The death of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.” A witness said Nehru showed shock. Later, speaking in Moscow, Mao displayed yet more generosity: He boasted that he was ”willing to lose 300 million people”-then, in 1957, half of China's population.
An English journalist, observing the Sisters of Charity in Calcutta, reasoned: ”Either life is always and in all circ.u.mstances sacred, or intrinsically of no account: it is inconceivable that it should be in some cases the one, and in some the other.”
I S R A E L In St. Anne's Basilica in Jerusalem, the plain stones magnified hymns in every tongue, all day, every day. Four people faltering at song sounded like choirs of all the dead souls on earth exalted.
Often in a church I have thought that while there is scant hope for me, I can ask G.o.d to strengthen the holiness of all these good people here-that man, that woman, that child ... and I do so. In St. Anne's Basilica it struck me in the middle of a white-robed priest's French service that possibly everybody in that stone chamber, and possibly everybody in every other house of prayer on earth, thinks this way. What if we are all praying for one another in the hope that the others are holy, when we are not? Of course this must be the case. Then-again possibly-surely it adds up to something or other?
E N C O U N T E R S In Cana lived a Palestinian merchant who gave wine to all comers. ”Wine for everyone,” he cried into the street. ”On the house.” He wore an open jacket and a blue s.h.i.+rt b.u.t.toned to the top. He brandished a silver tray full of tiny winegla.s.ses. My friends would not enter his shop. They thought it was a trick. It was a trick: Put a man through life for sixty years and he is generous to strangers. I took a gla.s.s of red wine from the silver tray and drank it down. In my ordinary life, I don't drink wine. Fine: This man was supposed to be selling souvenirs to tourists, which he was not doing, either. We ignored his merchandise. Leaning in his open doorway, we talked; we traded cigarettes and smoked.
Across the steep street we saw the church at Cana, built where John's gospel says Christ turned water into wine for a wedding. Then, in the late 1990s, he was one of 130,000 Palestinian Christians in the Galilee. Those I met were a highly educated bunch. Now almost all have fled into exile.