Underground Cities – Derinkuyu

I spent my time in Cappadocia taking short junkets to the underground cities. My first trip was to Derinkuyu, a small village about forty minutes by bus from where I was staying in the slightly larger village of Urgup. The bus ride took me through some of Cappadocia’s bizarre landscape that I mentioned in the last post. Here’s how this all formed: about 10 million years ago, the three massive volcanoes looming on the horizon were active. Lava and ash covered the region, then hardened in a layer of soft tufa rock many meters thick. Over time, wind and rain and newly formed lakes ate away at the tufa in strange patterns, leaving the landscape as it is today. I see tufa rock formations that seem to defy classification. Not hills or mountains or mounds or knolls or crags or buttes. Waves is the appropriate label. Waves with swells and ripples and perfectly smooth crests. Clusters of isolated columnar forms with conical peaks called fairy chimneys that look so much like phalluses that locals call the area where they are especially prominent Love Valley. Rock ridges that look soft as sand dunes. Tufa rock eroded in mushroom shapes or in perfect geometric cones. Mounds with such delicate furrows, they could be wrinkles in a piece of fabric. The desert scenes of Star Wars were filmed here. Flintstones should have been filmed here. Cappadocia has given me a whole new appreciation for the properties of rocks. My friend Michele decided that the scenery was a little too magical: ‘I just can’t take these rocks seriously.’ You almost find yourself suspicious of the topography, as though it were the product of a grandscale landscaping project to attract tourists. (You have to be pretty jaded to distrust geology). Carved into the side of nearly every rock formation in the area are small caves and burrows. Most of the caves date back to 3rd millennium BC  when the earliest inhabitants of Cappadocia used rudimentary metal and obsidian tools to carve small burrows to keep warm during the winter. The bus to Derinkuyu passes through potato farms and wine vineyards and apricot orchards and patches of pistachio plants that prosper in fertile volcanic soil. The farmers working these fields still use the caves dug out by their 5,000-year-old troglodyte ancestors for storing food and livestock.

Derinkuyu is one of Cappadocia’s larger cities. Like the other cities, significant stretches are still full of soil and unexplored. What has been dug out reaches down about 85 meters, eight levels. Another three levels to be excavated. Granaries, wineries, stables, school rooms, churches, oil presses, wells, storerooms. Accommodates up to 30,000 people. One of two hundred underground cities in the area. Perhaps all connected by tunnels in a singular massive network.  I reviewed all of this in my head as I approached the entrance. I’d been reading about Derinkuyu for the past few weeks. Conceptually, it was stunning – humans as earthworms, city as ant colony. Something out of a storybook. HG Wells or Asimov. But the stats and facts from books don’t give you any tactile sense of the space. I had no idea what the city would look like, how it’d be organized, laid out. I really didn’t know what to expect.

The entrance to Derinkuyu is a small concrete bunker-like structure in the middle of expansive flatlands. Inside, I find steps leading into darkness. Down about ten meters, into a large chamber, ceilings about eight feet high. It is cold enough that I can see my breath. And damp: running my hand along the wall I find the tufa wet. The air is clammy. Other cities I would visit later, like Ozluce and Mazi, have no infrastructure for tourists, are pitch dark, full of cobwebs and stink like animal dens; because Derinkuyu is a stop on tour routes, I find the first chamber lit up in lemon-orange light that illuminates every furrow and nook and ancient chisel mark in the coarse tufa walls. This first chamber is the stable. Three thousand years ago, the hall where I am standing would have been full of cows and donkeys and goats eating fodder from the troughs carved into the walls, the floor lined with hay, smelling of manure.

The Greek soldier-historian Xenophon describes such a stable in the earliest description of Cappadocia from the 4th century BC. In his Anabasis, he writes: “The houses were underground structures with an aperture like the mouth of a well by which to enter, but they were broad and spacious below. The entrance for the beasts of burden was dug out, but the human occupants descended by a ladder. In these dwellings were to be found goats and sheep and cattle, and cocks and hens, with their various progeny. The flocks and herds were all reared under cover upon green food. There were stores within of wheat and barley and vegetables, and wine made from barley in great big bowls.”

Down a long chute-like tunnel, I come across a doorway leading into another large chamber. On the other side of the doorway is a millstone – massive, nearly six feet across by two-and-a-half thick, shaped like a donut with a small hole in the middle. It’s wedged into a slot on the right side of the door and encroaches slightly on the passage. These millstones are found in all of the underground cities; they make up the security system. The primary function of these cities was defense. Cappadocia was a crossroads of every major trade route in the ancient world: any merchant carrying spices, carpets, wine, olive oil or silk between Persia, Egypt, India and China in the East and Rome and Greece in the West passed through the region. Whoever controlled Cappadocia controlled the trade routes and collected royalties on everything that moved along them. Naturally, the region was coveted by all of the surrounding nations. Over the span of about 3000 years, the people of Cappadocia were at various times invaded by the Persians, Greeks, Mongols and other neighboring people. The Hittites, early 2nd millennium BC inhabitants of Cappadocia who recorded their history in cuneiform  clay tablets, reference the later invaders – probably the Greeks – as the ‘sea people.’ In addition to foreign invaders, settlements in the region were constantly warding off raids from rival tribes. To look at the extent of the cities, one can imagine the frequency and intensity of these invasions. When, for example, a Hittite settlement was under attack, everyone in the town would retreat into the underground city, which most likely would have had a number of concealed entrances. The Hittites would disappear into the deeper recesses of the city where they had months’ worth of food and water stored in the naturally cool cave-larders that Xenophon describes, while two or three strong men rolled the millstones in front of strategic doorways. If the enemy tribesmen gave chase into the underground, they’d find themselves in pitch darkness, in narrow, low-ceilinged tunnels. To get from the stable to the millstone, I had had to duck-waddle, bent almost double, with my tripod dragging along the ground. In other stretches, I would be crawling on all fours. Had I been a tribesman pursuing a Hittite and had my tripod been a sword, I would have been effectively disarmed by the  tunnel. Upon reaching a doorway sealed-off by a millstone, Hittites would have shot arrows at me through the hole in the stone. Had I survived the arrows, they would have poured hot oil on me through small holes in the ceiling.

I pass through storerooms with niches carved to hold food – ‘big bowls of barley’ according to Xenophon. In another chamber, a well dropping 100 meters underground – instead of reaching to the surface, the opening of the well is on the first underground level, to safeguard against invaders poisoning the water supply. Down a long set of winding stairs, past two more mill stone seals and into one chamber containing a winery, another which branches into small burrows serving as family sleeping quarters. At the back of one chamber is a vertical passage leading up to the surface – a ventilation duct. The city seems to go on forever. A tunnel still clogged with soil in the corner of one chamber apparently links to another city ten kilometers away. The space becomes even more fascinating, I think, when, instead of its metaphors and abstractions, you consider the city’s practicalities and logistics. I wonder about maps. Did the people get lost? The space is expansive, the tunnels identical without any landmarks. Granted, someone who has spent enough time in the tunnels will be able to navigate the labyrinth. But in a moment of panic, when the city is under seige, I can’t imagine that someone wouldn’t become disoriented and forget which of the eleven floors they were on. Something else: the surrounding landscape on the surface is completely flat. All the dirt that was extracted in order to dig this city – where did it go? The limestone extracted from the underground quarries in Paris was enough to build one of the greatest cities in the world; the earth that came out of Derinkuyu alone would have created a medium-sized mountain. If you’re building an underground city to defend your people against invaders, you don’t want a mountain of earth marking the entrance. Sure enough, there isn’t the slightest undulation in the surrounding land. After actually removing the earth from the tunnels, the people must have done something with it. There is a river about eight kilometers away  perhaps the dumped the earth there.

The chambers become progressively colder the deeper I go and my fingers go numb against the metal of my tripod. As I descend, I also notice a change in the construction and lay-out of the rooms. The spaces on the first level had been roughhewn,  dug haphazardly, the layout like a rabbit warren. Floors cockeyed, ceilings uneven, doors in odd amoeba shapes, tunnels and corridors overlapping, corkscrewing, zigzagging, walls riddled with strange circular gaps like holes in Swiss cheese. Deeper down, I see larger chambers, more regularly shaped, smooth floors. Rooms branch off of tunnels with a certain amount of logic and sense of spacing suggesting that construction involved some level of forethought and planning.

The shallower levels, archeologists believe, are so irregular because they were carved by the most ancient people using primitive tools. The cities were not constructed all at once, but in stages over thousands of years, by increasingly larger civilizations who enlarged, embellished and improved upon the spaces previous communities had left behind. People believe that these cities began as small burrows dug out by the original settlers from the Bronze Age as refuge from harsh weather. Then the Hittites came along in the 18th or 19th century BC and settled in whatever spaces the people from the Bronze Age had left behind, but they had to dig deeper to accommodate their more populous settlements. As the Hittites were continually under attack, they dug deeper and perhaps installed the millstones as security measures. Around the 12th century BC, the Hittites were wiped out by the Phrygians, who took over the cities, and dug deeper. Between settlements of these larger unified nations, the cities presumably were conquered and and re-conquered by local tribes. Around the beginning of the modern period, the early Christians, who had fled to Cappadocia to escape Roman and, later, Arab persecution, became the final occupants of the cities. They, in turn, dug deeper or enlarged preexisting spaces to accommodate churches and refectories and schools of Christianity. Sure enough, on the last excavated level, the eighth, I find myself in wide hallways, four or five times larger than hallways on the first floor, lined with pillars and benches carved into the walls. The rooms connected to this hall are spacious, walls meet ceilings and floors at right angles. Standing in the gloom of what would have been one of the world’s first churches, nearly 300 feet underground, I think of a story I once heard from my friend Adriano, a spelunker-archeologist in Rome. One time, he had recived a phone call from the nuns at a local church: they had found a trapdoor in the floor leading to a dark space beneath the church, a crypt, it seemed. When he arrived at the church, he found the sisters hysterical, cowering away from the open door in the floor, crossing themselves repeatedly (as it turned out, the space was small and empty). The story came up as we were talking about the strange hold the underground has on the human imagination. But it’s difficult to ignore the religious overtones in Adriano’s story: nuns clucking around a church, blessing themselves, protecting themselves from a dark, underground space, from Hell. Christians are very attached to their vertical cosmos: good things above, bad things below. Which is why I have to wonder whether, 2100 years ago, the irony ocurred to any of those pioneer Christians: sitting on the floor of a dark, dank, foul-smelling space, 300 feet underground, listening to a priest talk about leading a righteous life in order to avoid the ubiquitous descent into Hell. A divorce of the metaphorical and the tangible.

I make way back to the surface, ducking through low tunnels, scraping up winding stairways, past the same millstone barriers. I get closer to the surface, passing through chambers that are slanted with oddly shaped domed ceilings, floors undulating, cockeyed, irregular. Usually, the deeper archeologists dig, the more ancient their findings. When I was in Rome, I went into the basement of San Clemente and in the span of thirty meters, passed through five layers of history going back 2000 years.  Underground, this vertical timeline is inverted. I descend and watch history progress 2000 years from the ancient to the modern; on my way up, the last level I see, less than ten meters below present day Turkey, is the roughewn stable, the most ancient of any space in the city.

Balloon Ride

So I took a hot air balloon ride over Cappadocia the other morning. It cost an arm and a leg, it was a big fat tourist bonanza (think herding sheep into a big wicker basket), and it was  the diametric opposite of going underground, but it was great. Fifteen of us were picked up at five thirty in the morning, carted off to the middle of a valley where about thirty other vividly colored balloons were in various stages of inflating, loading, taking off.  Standing in the field, freezing, we were subjected to a comedy routine by an old Aussie guy who had been up for the past twelve hours drinking, still hadn’t slept. If I could snap my fingers and make one continent disappear… Anyway, we watched them inflate our balloon – a big red one – with a hot air pump. It had a disconcerting message on it: ‘In Loving Memory of Dennis.’ Before I could ask what happened to Dennis, we all climbed into the basket (the Aussie dove in headfirst), which was divided into four quarters. I was of course placed next to the Aussie who had lots of good things to tell me about what piece of anatomy the fairy chimneys reminded him of. Then, with a few thrusts from the torch, we were floating above the valleys and mountain ranges of Cappadocia. It lasted about an hour and was fantastic. Especially with all of the other balloons around us. Weightless among all of these floating globes. The pilot took us up into a cloud at one point, where all of the other balloons became silhouettes. We landed and the pilot popped open two bottles of champagne then called out our names one by one to give us our flight certificates. Ha. See pictures here.

Arrived in Turkey, Cappadocia

So I am in Turkey now. Arrived a few days ago. Excited to be here, though feeling a bit numb after India. Smells, sounds, colors, tastes all seem a little muted. I got off the plane in Istanbul and there was no mob of small men harassing me into rickshaws; no cows; no beggars; no women in blindingly colorful saris; no one asking to take their picture with me; no one braying chai, chai, chai. It felt like some kind of trick.

So I spent two days in Istanbul. I didn’t really do too much exploring – these two days were like a buffer between India and Turkey. Time to regroup, prepare for a whole new country worth of stimulation. From what I saw, Istanbul is a beautiful city – horizons of mosques, minarets, carpets, insert orientalist image here. Actually, the city feels a lot more Western European than I had expected, though again that may be post-India-syndrome. The city is bisected by the Bosphorous river (which is apparently not a river, but a strait). The Western side of the Bosphorous is called Europe, the Eastern side Asia. My hostel was in Europe. My first day, I took the boat over to Asia to meet Aysegul – an Istanbulite – for some turkish pizza and beer. First beer I’ve had in a long time that wasn’t laced with glycerine, which is the preservative they use in India. We had a good time catching up. Aysegul devised another way to read my fortune (in Paris, it was Turkish coffee grains; this time, a strange mystical mind game that she got from Cosmo), and gave me advice about traveling in Turkey: ‘it will be impossible… don’t trust Turkish people… careful of donkey meat… dont say anything bad about Ataturk.’ I tried and failed to convince her that I wasn’t exhausted from 9 months of travel, then tried and failed to describe India.

Second day, I walked around, ate three döner kebabs in too short of a time, bought a scarf and a semi-respectable leather jacket. It’s about sixty during the day and I’ve been freezing; India has left me thin-blooded. I couldn’t muster up any patience for the tourist attractions, which all had lines snaking around the block. I’ll be back through Istanbul in a few weeks and the Hagia Sofia isn’t going anywhere. I’m reading My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk, which is set in Istanbul. Pamuk’s Istanbul is a concoction of mysterious people, an intellectual, spiritual, artistic hub of the world. Granted, that was the 16th century, but it makes me excited to come back and explore the city further.

Now, I’m in Cappadocia, in central Turkey, which is where I’ll be based for a few weeks. It’s every bit as bizarre and beautiful as I expected. The landscape is something from another planet. Ranges of white rock hills in impossibly smooth, almost creamy formations. Sheer upright columns called ‘fairy chimneys’ – the result of some sort of erosion process involving basalt and tufa. Cliff faces carved with hundreds of little caves and burrows and hideaways and nooks. The whole landscape looks like a massive, terrestrial coral reef. I’ll be posting pictures soon.

So I’m here for the underground cities. Tomorrow, I’m going to see Derinkuyu, the largest, most famous city. I’ll get more into the stories behind these spaces next post.

Bhaja and Karla Caves… and surprise festival

One of my last cave excursions in India was to the Karla and Bhaja caves, outside a small town called Lonavala. Both Bhaja and Karla are Buddhist, dating back to 2nd century BC. I went to Bhaja first. I befriended a shopkeeper in the village so he would take care of my bag fr a few hours, climbed a hill that nearly killed me in 100-plus heat, enjoyed the view over scorched Maharashtra landscape dotted with clusters of straw huts and the occasional Hindu temple. In the caves, I found a group of Indians performing a puja (prayer) ceremony. Lots of colorful body paint, a man with a whip, the remains from some sort of sacrifice. India is unfailingly photogenic. One man was so excited to have his picture taken, he climbed on top of the stupa in the main cave, which I can’t imagine wasn’t some form blasphemy. The stupa is the domed cylinder at the back of the cave. It’s a shrine: the representation or avatar of whatever god they are worshiping.  People throw coins on top of the stupa as offerings. The guy monkeyed his way up on top of the dome and started pocketing the coins, while everyone laughed. Later, a group of older women showed up dressed in matching vivid green saris. With them was one beautiful younger girl in yellow. Between not terribly discreet sidelong glances to make sure I had my camera on her, she started dancing and twirling, moves straight out of Bollywood films. I approached her later and she acted shocked, ‘You took pictures of me?’ While her elder escorts glared at us, she made me flip through every one, requesting that I zoom in on the ones she liked. See Bhaja Cave pictures here.

After a while, I left Bhaja and made my way over to Karla, which is about five km away. I had been surprised to see anyone at Bhaja; it had probably been my most eventful cave visit. Usually, these sites are deserted. Most are carved into cliffs in remote areas. Places you really have to make an effort to get to. Occasionally a few tourists, but otherwise  quiet. Appropriate,  I suppose: these places were built as retreats for Buddhist monks to meditate and pray. At both Ellora and Ajanta, I napped in smaller caves. At Aurangabad, Pitalkhora, and Kanheri, monkeys outnumbered humans 20-1. Which is why I was a little surprised when, on the road to Karla, I started noticing large crowds of people. By the time I reached the foot of the mountain where the caves were located, I was in the middle of what looked like a gypsy camp. Hundreds of tents. People sleeping under their trucks. Kids running around naked. Groups of young guys playing drums. Others dancing to music blasting from car speakers. Roads packed with people selling wares from ad-hoc stands: watches, cricket bats, chickens, candy, fruit, toys, cucumbers. The scene seemed to sprawl for miles. There must have been two thousand people there. Someone explained that this was a Hindu festival. These people had made a pilgrimage to Karla from East India (Karla is in the West). Someone told me they were ‘people who fish’ and had come to worship the goddess of fishermen. The next three hours would be full of equally enigmatic and usually contradictory explanations. The path winding back and forth up the mountain to the caves was marked by a slowly moving crowd of people. I could hear singing and drumming coming from above.

On the way up to the caves, I passed a parade coming down. Lines of drummers. Men yelling into bullhorns. Trumpets. There was a canopied chair carried on shoulders that someone told me was the goddess. When it passed through the crowd, people touched it and said (yelled) prayers. People were excited to see a westerner and my progress up the mountain was slow for the photo requests.

When I made it up onto the plateau where the caves have been carved into a cliff, I noticed things in a particular order. First, the grandeur of the caves. As I said, 2nd century BC. The centerpiece was a beautiful, monumental Chaitya (prayer) hall, perhaps the largest in India, with vaulted, ribbed ceilings, thirty-forty feet high. Second I saw a Hindu temple painted in outrageous blue and red and yellow dayglo colors, adorned with flags and bells, that had been constructed about twelve feet in front of the entrance to the main cave. There was a procession of about 200 people lined up, shoving to get into this very small temple. Another 200 or so stood in front of the cave, apparently waiting for something to happen. Some with faces painted, and bright pink powder on their shoulders, in their hair.

As I approached the cave, I saw that the neon pink dust had been cast over the ornate 15 foot high Buddhist sculptures carved into the façade. Inside, the entire floor of the cave, the columns running along each side, the stupa in the back had all been coated in the same pink. Around this time, the drumming began and, from there, everything became more or less incomprehensible. Just when I thought India couldn’t get any more baffling. I’ll try to describe what I  saw and maybe you can help me decipher what the hell was going on.

There are two teams. One wearing yellow shirts, one wearing white shirts. All men. Women, for the most part, are seated outside of the cave. The teams face off in the cave. The competition, if this is what it is, seems to be based around drumming and dancing. Each team has a band of drummers and dancers. Before the competition can really get going, however, someone from the white team says something that upsets the yellow team. They start pushing each other and what I presume are insults ring off the pink-dusted columns of the cave. People climb on each other’s shoulders. I can’t help but think of the Buddhist monks who lived and prayed here two thousand years ago rolling in their grave. After a few moments, the disagreement is settled, but the yellow team ejects the white team from the cave. During a short interlude, the yellow team goes into a sort of huddle, evidently talking strategy. This is interrupted by the sound of loud drumming from outside. The white team has begun their demonstration. The white-team drummers drum while the dancers dance with great vigor. Much laughter and cheering accompanies the dancing. Energy escalates into fervor and the chickens that many people are holding escape and fly onto the roof the Hindu temple or into the upper eaves of the cave. There are a significant number of umbrellas. An older woman seems to become possessed by something – music or spirit or some combination of the two – and everyone stands back while she jacknifes and moans with her eyes rolled back and wiggles her fingers towards the sky. Pentecostalism, but better, because it’s EXOTIC. When she is taken care of by someone, the dancing continues. Eventually, it is the yellow team’s turn. They undertake pretty much the same routine as the white team, with comparable vigor. They wave a flag of impressive size and have trumpets and an organized band with some kind of conductor. Beggar men dressed in rags with long beards watch passively from the side. Beggar women try to bless people on their foreheads and are pushed aside. The spirit of their dancers, in my opinion, is less than that of the white team. Finally, the procession is diverted when someone carries out the canopied chair holding the avatar of the goddess. White and yellow teams seem to forget their differences and both follow the goddess on their way down the mountain. There is no sign of anything to do with fishermen. I take about 300 pictures and remain completely and utterly confused.

In retrospect, I have a feeling that all of this was a political event. The elections were coming up in India and I did see a few signs that could have been political. Political event masquerading as religious festival? But I don’t know. Look at the pictures here and let me know if you can make sense of what is going on.

Barabar Caves

Carved into a range of granite hills in the hot, barren backcountry of Bihar, in Northeast India, is a group of caves called the Barabar Caves. There are seven caves and they are small and modest; among India’s more than 1200 cave temples, especially the profusely sculpted and painted masterpieces at Ajanta and Ellora, the Barabar Caves are hardly worth mentioning, nevermind visiting. But they happen to be a bookend in the history of Indian architecture: with inscriptions from around 3rd century BC, they are the country’s earliest example of rock-cut architecture, indeed the oldest standing construction of any kind in India. But, while their antiquity certainly makes them worth seeing, I wanted to visit the caves for another reason: they are a major backdrop to EM Forster’s Passage to India.

Basically all of the drama and conflict in Forster’s novel are brought on by a visit to the caves. Dr. Aziz, an Indian man, invites Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore, the fiance and mother of a high-ranking British civil servant, on a picnic to the caves. This attempt at a rare Indian-British friendship ends in disaster. The older woman’s experience in one cave triggers a sort of anti-epiphany that ‘undermines her hold on life,’ leads to her nervous breakdown and eventually to her death. The younger woman flees from another cave traumatized, believing herself victim of an attempted rape. Dr. Aziz is blamed for the assault, causing his public disgrace.

From the moment Forster introduces the caves, it is clear that they will play a significant role in the story; his descriptions of Barabar (which he calls Marabar) are sweeping, expansive, bordering on grandiose. ‘They are like nothing else in the world,’ he writes, ‘a glimpse of them makes the breath catch… they rob infinity and eternity of their vastness.’ He ascribes them an eerie, even supernatural quality, that seems to confound the author himself. ‘Uncanny,’ ‘spiritual,’ he calls them. ‘…the [caves] are unfrequented, as if pilgrims, who generally seek the extraordinary, had here found too much of it.’ They may even be haunted: when British officials flip their car while driving on the road to Barabar, they blame the wreck on a ‘savage pig,’ a ‘ghost,’ a ‘specter.’ Above all, the caves are imbued with a vague sense of tension, disturbance and foreboding. In the novel’s opening pages, Dr. Aziz warns Mrs. Moore, the elder British lady, against walking alone at night: ‘Bad characters… and leopards may come over from the Marabar Hills. Snakes also.’

Which is why I couldn’t help but laugh when everyone I talked to in Gaya, the small town about 30 km to the south of the caves, listed similar vague threats about the caves. The manager of my hotel told me that going to see the Barabar Caves was ‘impossible.’ He said huffily that they were in Naxalite territory and therefore I should forget it. ‘Impossible,’ he said again. From the way he said Naxalite they might’ve been a ring of dark horsemen from Tolkein. In reality, they were a group of communists at odds with the state government’s laws on land reform. I knew that Bihar was one of the more unruly states in India – a British ex-pat I met called it ‘the Wild West.’ And people had told me about the Naxalites, but I didn’t believe they would ambush someone taking a few pictures of some abandoned caves. Furthermore, the manager and I had just argued over the price of a room. He seemed to be searching for a way to disappoint me.

I walked into town and asked the taxi foreman at the train station if he might be able to help. He was a short, rotund man, shaped not unlike the grapes he ate by the handful while he listened to my request. When I finished, he nodded and started making phone calls. No mention of Naxalites, which I figured was a good sign. Soon, a man in a gray taxi driver’s uniform came into his small, poorly lit office and the two of them had a conversation in Hindi, during which the driver continually shook his head ‘no.’ Finally, the foreman dismissed the man with a quick wave of his hand. When the driver stood up to leave, he sent his chair sliding across the concrete floor. The only word I had understood in the conversation was ‘Holi,’ the name of a festival that was about to begin in Gaya. With the driver gone, the foreman explained that unfortunately a trip to the caves was impossible for the time being. Drivers, he explained, refused to go near Barabar during Holi.

I had learned what little I knew about Holi from people on the train to Gaya. I knew it involved people painting each other’s faces with colored dye and that it was one of the only times of the year when it wasn’t taboo to drink alcohol. From what I had heard, during Holi, rural areas like those surrounding Gaya revert to a kind of anarchy. ‘In Holi,’ said a kid I met on the train in this sort of foreboding whisper, ‘people go mad.’ It’s hard to guage the meaning of the word ‘mad’ in India. On the one hand, India does not have a drinking culture and this boy could have been equating ‘mad’ with ‘drunk.’ On the other hand, pretty much any ‘madness’ I had witnessed at any point in my life paled in comparison with what I had seen over a month in India: Hindu ceremonies with people convulsing on the floor, speaking in tongues; transvestites challenging men to fistfights on the train; buses cruising at 50 mph with twenty or thirty men piled on the roof, holding onto the railings for dear life; policemen in the street beating men unconscious with wooden staffs. ‘Mad,’ it seemed, could mean anything in India. The taxi foreman explained that driving through the villages near Barabar was risking a cracked windshield, or a slashed tire. “During Holi, people in the villages…” he paused. “They are not thinking.” Forster’s caves are haunted by ‘bad characters,’ ‘leopards’ and ‘snakes.’ I had to contend with science fiction communists and drunk farmers in facepaint.

The next day, Andrew and I found the streets of Gaya full of purple, green, red, blue people. The dyes they used were vivid and people painted not only their faces, but their whole bodies. We were the only two Westerners in town and before long we were followed by a trail of multi-colored children. There is something priceless about a kid painted head-to-toe in turquoise gawking at a pair of white Westerners like we were the freaks. Occasionally, people popped out of sidestreets to smear our faces with paint and wish us ‘Happy Holi!’ Children splashed dye on passersby from the rooftops. Lots of laughing, whooping, singing, embracing. Every time a group of Indians kids doused us, they would watch our faces, wondering if we would get angry: ‘don’t be angry, please. It’s because of Holi!’ While the celebration in Gaya was very innocent, it wasn’t hard to see how this festival might get out of hand. In Gaya, they had doubled the police force to keep people under control. On the train down to meet up with me in Gaya, Andrew encountered packs of drunk teenagers jumping on trains at each station, yelling at passengers, pelting them with rocks or rotten vegetables or cow patties. An older man hit with a rock, bleeding from his head.

See more Holi pictures here.

When Holi had subsided, a driver agreed to take Andrew and I out to the caves. In Passage to India, Dr. Aziz and the British ladies travel to the caves by elephant; we took an SUV with a busted suspension. For all the drama of the our journey’s potential deterrents, the trip was uneventful. We left the disordered, paint-spattered streets of Gaya, followed a two-lane road north across mostly uninhabited grass plains. Long-trunked palm trees lined the road. It was on this road that the Jeep of British officials in Forster’s book was knocked over by a savage ghost pig. This was also, apparently, where the Naxalites roamed. Andrew and I watched out the windows for some kind of black magic bandits that would do justice to that name. All we saw were kids playing cricket on tracts of rust-colored dirt, men in dhotis carrying sacks of grain across flat fields, and the occasional obelisk-shaped brick kiln, with smoke stains circling the top lip. Eventually, we turned off the main drag, down an unmaintained road, nothing more than a long string of potholes. On either side unfolded stretches of scrubby, half-scorched fields. We drove through villages of crude thatched-roof huts on grids of dirt paths. Men walking through fields with hay bales on their backs. Old bearded gurus in rags with colored puja marks on their foreheads, staring at us from the shade of huts. Kids shitting in ditches by the side of the road. We could still see the colorful residue of Holi dye splattered on the outer walls of cottages. The villagers seemed peaceful, certainly not the type to ransack a passing taxi. Then again, maybe they were just tired after a Holi spent pillaging and marauding.

All at once, we saw a range of spiny rock hills silhouetted on the horizon. They looked alien, rising at sharp angles incongruous with the rest of the landscape, which was subdued, calm. These were the Barabar Hills.
Ten minutes later, we were at the foot of the hills, greeting Nudu, the smiling, heavy-browed Indian man who would be our guide. He could say ‘cave’ and ‘beautiful’ and not much else. Draped in loose white cloth and headwrap, Nudu set out ahead of us in the mid-morning sun, leading us up a stone stairway that snaked through the boulder-ridden landscape. Within a few minutes, we were outside of the first cave.

Five of the seven caves at Barabar were cut from one massive, granite mound. This half-buried gray rock was three hundred feet long, by thirty wide, by thirty high. The formation was so different from everything around it, its presence appeared to be a mistake. While the surrounding rock hills were jagged, jutting out at raw angles, with edges crude and serrated, the hill into which the caves were carved was rounded, smooth, worn, weathered, refined. It seemed more ancient than its neighbors, more wise, if one could apply that attribute to a rock. Forster calls this mound ‘the flesh of the sun’s flesh’ and ‘older than all spirit.’ The boulder looked to have spent an age at the bottom of an ocean. In fact, the rock’s smooth elongated shape recalled nothing other than an enormous gray whale, swept up and deposited among these hills by some prehistoric tidal wave.
Nudu lead us into the first cave. The entrance was an almost perfectly regular rectangle, about six by three feet. The opening, bare of any inscription or carving to the point where it almost seemed like another contour of the stone, opened into a chamber of pitch darkness. Nudu lit two candles and handed one to each of us. When our eyes adjusted, we saw a chamber perhaps thirty feet long, fifteen feet wide by twleve feet high. A hall with rounded, arched ceilings created essentially a half barrel shape. An altar of some sort sat at one end. We noticed that the pinkish granite walls had been polished to a high gleam. Forster writes: “There is little to see, and no eye to see it, until the visitor arrives for his five minutes, and strikes a match. Immediately another flame rises in the depths of the rock and moves towards the surface like an imprisoned spirit; the walls of the ciruclar chamber have been most marvellously polished. The two flames approach and strive to unite, but cannot, because one of them breathes air, the other stone.” Indeed, to stand before the wall holding a candle created an almost perfect reflection, as though in a mirror. Sitting in this first cave, all I could think about was the devotion required to make such an excavation from solid rock, to keep the dimensions so uniform, and to polish every surface to such a shine. Especially with whatever primitive tools they had over 2000 years ago.

According to James Fergusson and James Burgess, co-authors of the most comprehensive study on Indian cave temples to-date, a massive tome from the late 1800s that I had been lugging around for weeks in my backpack, these caves were constructed under the order of emperor Ashoka (264 BC – 255 BC). Ashoka the Great had been a ruler infamous for volatilty and ruthlessness, the type to execute subjects and family members without provocation. Then, after a particularly bloody battle, he had some kind of epiphany, converted to Buddhism, became a vegetarian and began traveling around India planting trees, and building monuments to Buddha. The Barabar caves were commisioned by Ashoka as retreats for Buddhist suddhas, or ascetic holy men, to come and meditate.

Nudu led us out of the first cave and around to the other side of the granite mound. The door to the second cave was identical to that of the first: rectangular, sharp-edged, leading into an interior chamber, which was smaller, but of similar character and shape to the first cave. We ran our hands along the interior walls, smooth and polished like those of the first. Outside of the polished areas, we could see rake-like scratching left from the original excavation tools. When our eyes adjusted, Nudu pointed out a smaller, circular chamber connected to the main hall. As soon as we entered the small hollow, the sound of our footsteps reverberated along the walls, but not until Nudu made a sharp barking noise were we aware of the intensity of the echo.

In the novel, this echo brings on Mrs. Moore’s existential crisis. She describes it: ‘a terrifying echo… entirely devoid of distinction. Whatever is said, the same monotonous noise replies, and quivers up and down the walls intil it is absorbed into the roof. Buom is the sound as far as the human alphabet can express it, or ‘bou-oum’ or ‘ou-boum’ – utterly dull. Hope, politeness, or the blowing of a nose, the squeak of a boot, all produce ‘buom’.’ We stood in the small chamber for a good twenty minutes, testing the echo. To everything we said, the response was indeed deep and dull, a bellow, an elongated thump. We timed the length of a reverberation: nearly eight seconds (see the video on Flickr). Saddhu men meditating here would have been able to maintain a single om interminably. I thought of an arched chamber in Grand Central Station, where a whisper spoken into one corner will travel across the face of the domed ceiling and be heard perfectly by someone standing in the far corner. But the acoustics in the chamber at Grand Central created a delicate, subtle ring; here, at the Barabar Caves, the echo was almost brutish, overwhelming, drowning out any distinction in the sounds which created it. He goes on: ‘Pathos, piety, courage – they exist, but are identical, and so is filth. Everything exists, nothing has value… If one had spoken vileness in that place or quoted lofty poetry, the comment would have been the same – ‘ou-buom’…’ In the monotony of these reverberating sounds, Mrs. Moore sees the triviality of religion: ‘”Let there be light,” “it is finished” only amounted to “buom.”’

The remaining caves were similar to the first two, though without the remarkable echo. The largest cave in the group, called Loma Kasha, had a simple façade carved with elephants and an inscription apparently praising Emperor Ashoka. Other than that. nothing extraordinary. After leaving the last cave, we tried and failed to have a number of conversations with Nudu – one about the inscriptions, one about meditation – but recieved only head wobbles in response. Eventually, we left the strange, smooth granite mound, made our way back down to the car and headed back to Gaya.

See the rest of the photos here.

Varanasi

I am standing on our little half-moon-shaped balcony at the Hotel Sonmony in Varanasi. The hotel is five stories tall, a building of ungraceful cylindrical architecture and muted pastel color schemes. The stariways are mildewy, the silhouettes of geckoes appear on grimy, half-tinted windows. Andrew and I are paying six dollars a night for a double room. Not four feet from the balcony where I stand is a large tower of utility power lines. Next to this grimy trap of wires is an abandoned construction site, covered in dust, overrun by mangy, gray-haired monkeys. (Later, we would watch a man nearly fall from the window of this building as he slapped his sandal at one of the offending monkeys). Next to the construction site is some sort of Hindu temple lined with orange and blue and green tiles and icons of Shiva and Pavrati. Beyond the temple and the half-finished building are a set of stairs – called a ghat –  that lead down to the Ganges river which runs the Western length of the city. I look down and see five men carrying something on their shoulders through the narrow dirt street to the river. The bundle is not difficult to discern: it’s a human corpse. Two small lumps: feet, with toes pointed up; a gentler rise: the forehead, nose, mouth, chin. The body, resting on a stretcher devised from green bamboo, is wrapped in a reflective silver material. Partially layered on top of this is an orange shroud and on top of this are coils of bright yellow flowers that recall Hawaiian leis. There are four men carrying the body, while another follows them, throwing handfuls of rice on their heads and on the body itself. Nearby someone plays drums and chants and rings a bell. It strikes me that the languid chaos of the street does not pause for this procession. A man passes in front of the body carrying a bicycle with a bent frame; a boy pushes a wheelbarrow of vegetables alongside. No acknowledgement of the body. The men carrying the body sidestep an older man sleeping in the middle of street, tilting the stretcher to maintain balance. They thread their way between massive water buffalo who treat the streets of Varanasi as their own pasture. Trailing the men is a string of five or six goats, one with a broken leg that flaps beneath it rather gruesomely. It is difficult to read the expressions on the faces of the stretcher-bearers. Their faces seem placid, even ambivalent, which is strange, given what rests on their shoulders. For the lack of registered emotion, I catch myself thinking of bakers carrying a colorful wedding cake. The procession disappears from my view behind the dilapidated building.
The orange paint of the balcony where I stand has been dulled to a brownish gray. The day before I had been in Calcutta, where building façades are sepia-toned with dust and grunge of the traffic. The grime on this balcony, though, isn’t from cars and rickshaws. It’s ash from bodies that have been burned on the banks of the Ganges. The body that was just carried beneath my window will be brought down the Harischandra Ghat to the shore of the river and laid on a wooden pyre. The pyre will be lit, the body will burn in the open air and eventually the deceased’s ashes will be scattered into the sacred Ganges. According to Hindus, having your ashes scattered on the Ganges helps you escape the cycle of reincarnation. People come from all over India to die in Varanasi.

Andrew and I made our way down to the edge of the Ganges to watch the cremation. Piled ten feet high along the street leading to this ghat are heaps of wooden logs that will eventually be used to construct the pyres. We watch a pair of goats clamber up a woodpile. We are told later that 360 kilograms of wood are required to construct one pyre. The ceremony we see as we descend the ghat takes place twice a day – at sunrise and sunset. The amount of cremations, I suppose, depends on the amount of bodies at a given time; that evening, five bodies would be cremated. (At Marnikarnika, the larger of the two burning ghats, the rate may be twice that). We sit down on some benches facing the slow-moving, murky Ganges.

Men of a low caste – outcasts called doms or untouchables – carry wood down from the piles on the street. They build the pyre on the riverbank, five or six feet from the water. The cost of the funeral depends on the type of wood used, sandalwood being the most expensive. The body is unwrapped of its colorful dressings, leaving only a simple white covering. The face is left exposed and we see that this is an elderly woman. The body is laid on the pyre while ten or fifteen men (women, we are told, are not allowed to attend the cremations) mill around, talking quietly or sitting on the ground around the body. We begin talking with the Indian man sitting next to us on the bench and he quietly explains what is happening. One man – the eldest son of the deceased, we are told – strips down to his underwear and puts on a flowing two-piece white robe. His head has been shaved except for a small shock of hair in the back. This particular man has some sort of skin disease which leaves a marbled design on his scalp. He is handed a bundle of straw, which is then lit, and everyone watches as he circles the pyre five times while saying a prayer. Finally, he drops the straw on the wood and the pyre begins to burn.

Again, I am struck by the informality of the ceremony. The lack of ceremony, I guess. A creek of sewage running from beneath the ghat and into the river passes not five feet from the body. One cluster of mourners jumps to their feet to avoid a cow pissing a few feet away. Just upstream, people are doing their laundry, slapping wet shirts against wooden planks. When the bright silver and orange dressings are removed from the body and cast aside on the beach, street children run up to steal it and scamper away. Someone kicks at a goat who has wriggled through the crowd to nibble at the foot of the body. The tone of the ceremony is subdued, everything is very matter-of-fact. The man chat amongst themselves sociably as though they had met on the beach by chance. There are certainly no theatrics. After a moment, the man who had been explaining the ceremony gets up and thanks us. ‘I must go,’ he says. ‘This is the mother of my wife.’ And he walks down to join the people clustered around the burning body. When the wind shifts, we start coughing on the smoke. I think of where that smoke is coming from, recoil a little, then immediately feel prudish for doing so.

Over the next few days, we would see dozens of bodies carried past us on the street. These encounters bring on the strangest sort of double-takes. We pass a van parked in front of our hotel. Pressed against the inside window, contorted at an odd angle, is a gray human foot. One morning, we get up at dawn to see the main burning ghat at Marnikarnika (the one in front of our hotel, Harischandra, is the secondary burning ghat). Apart from being a clusterfuck of men hounding you with offers of boat rides, this is an eerie and surreal place. Wood is stacked high everywhere, all of it blackened with ash from the cremations. One of the wood-bearers points out a sort of hotel rising up behind the burning pit. This, he says, is where the dying come to spend their last days before being carried down and laid out on a pyre for cremation. This appropriately dilapidated façade is black with soot and ash. It seems too macabre to be real. The kind of thing that wouldn’t even seem plausible in a B horror movie. While crossing a pontoon bridge on our way to an old military fort down the river from the burning ghats, Andrew and I look down to see a human skull washed up on the edge of a sandbar.

The remarkable part of this is the role of the Ganges in the everyday life of Varanasi. A woman washes the family’s clothes in the river, just ten yards from where a little boy dumps a week’s worth of garbage. Families bathe here every morning. (There are specific ghats meant for bathing, but some are just a hundred meters from where bodies are incinerated). Men catch fish on the river – the menu at the hotel restaurant is points out that fish dishes are ‘not Ganga fish.’ Kids swim and splash each other and climb on top of the water buffalo. At dawn we see bearded Gurus meditating on the riverbank with sun rising over eastern shore. Later, we pass men sitting on the banks, brushing their teeth with Ganges water.

This is all a little unsettling at first, but I think there’s a beautiful order to the river and to the cremation ceremonies and to the Hindu relationship with death. According to Hinduism a body is just a vessel: in death, the soul of the deceased leaves the body and continues in a cycle until it is reincarnated in another body. When a body is cremated on the Ganges, its ashes are cast off into the river which is the lifeforce of the community; the dead, in a way, recirculate and are reincarnated when a mother bathes her child in the river, or when a man brings home a Ganga fish for his family, or even in a load of laundry. It’s appropriate, too, that a corpse carried through the streets passes unnoticed by the boy pushing a wagon of vegetables. Death isn’t any dramatic event, just something that is thrown in with the rest of life.

Photos of Varanasi here.

Vietnam

So, playing catch-up again. Computer time is scarce these days, so these entries are going to be breezy. Flew Paris-Singapore, Singpaore-Saigon. Didn’t sleep on the plane, arrived delirious, overwhelmed by Saigon. Walking through this city is like being stuck in a beehive. Rickshaws, bicycles, cars, trucks and impossible numbers of motorbikes swarm the streets. The reek of exhaust fumes, the soundtrack of bike horns are ubiquitous. Often, you can’t see the street for the density of the bikes. You see three people on a bike, four people on a bike, five people on a bike. Two parents, two kids squeezed between them, a grandfather clinging onto the back. No helmets. These are not large bikes. 110-120 ccs. In addition to human cargo, you will find bikes carrying four trees’ worth of bananas, a pig in a cage, a significant number of shoes, or chickens, or a mattress, or any number of watermelons, or sacks of rice. They do not drive slowly. The traffic at a roundabout is most remarkable. People cut each other off, blare horns, recklessly enter and exit this vehicular cyclone. You see one school of motorbikes – think fishes – approach another school of motorbikes and you brace yourself for imminent carnage, a t-boned bike, heads split open like canteloupe on the streets. But, miraculously, in a chorus of honks and beeps, the bikes slow down, and one school incorporates the other. The traffic is organic, like eddies a river current. Sometimes you will see a bike actually turned around, facing the wrong way with another throng of bikes bearing down on it, but the current slowly rights the bike and everyone ends up safe. It is a like watching a tightrope walking act at the circus. The tightrope walker wobbles on his wire, and in this moment of suspense, the audience 100 feet below, gasps and covers its eyes, waiting for the sound of internal organs splatting against the ground, but the tightrope walker regains his balance and the audience sighs with relief. This chaos is reflected the power lines above the street. Hundreds of wires strung from in one telephone pole. Thick and tangled as eagles’ nests. But there is incongruity. The traffic flows around massive green spaces with shrubberies molded in communist propoganda. The hub of a chaotic roundabout will be a 10-by-10-meter-square star of yellow flowers laid a bed of red flowers. Or a bush trimmed in the shape of a fifteen meter long hammer and sickle. Never a leaf out of place – as painstaking and pristine as the traffic is frenzied and orderless. Saigon has more to offer, I’m sure, but I spent most of my time taking pictures of the traffic. See Flickr Set.

I started by taking a few trips outside of Saigon. First out to Tay Ninh, 80 km NW of the city. First glimpses of the South Vietnamese landscape that would become familiar over the next few weeks. Busy, dusty, oppressively hot main road lined with small, brightly colored concrete hovels, roughly the size and shape of suburban garages. Canopied storefronts where people sit on small plastic chairs eating the country’s staple dish: pho bo (beef soup). Motorbikes parked orderlessly in front of these cafés. Hammocks tied to trees in rare places of shade. Palm trees with haggard fronds rising up behind this strip of storefronts. Occasionally opening up into far-reaching bright green rice fields. Fields are sectioned off in squares of a perfect sort of geometry that seems to compliment the fieldworkers’ conical hats. Groves of bamboo and rubber trees. Attached to every streetlamp lining the road are symbols of communism, red flags emblazoned with stars or hammer-and-sickle in yellow. We pass Chang Thang, the road which served as backdrop to the famous photograph of the woman screaming, naked, running from a napalm explosion.

In Tay Ninh I wanted to see the Cao Dai temple that Graham Greene describes in The Quiet American. Caodaism is one of the minority religions in Vietnam. (Buddhism, Christianity and Confucianism are the main ones). Caodaism is a synthesis of teachings from Buddha, Jesus Christ, Confucius, Lao-Tse. An interesting enough cocktail in itself. But, it gets better: Victor Hugo has his own temple. They also worship William Shakespeare and Julius Caesar and Joan of Arc and Winston Churchill. Seeing the roster of philosophies incorporated in the Cao Dai doctrines, you imagine a six-year-old in an ice cream parlor choosing ingredients for a sundae. The hub of this religion is the Holy See temple in Tay Ninh. Greene’s curmudgeony narrator makes fun of the temple, calling it a “Disney fantasia of the East.” I wanted to behold the absurdity for myself. It didn’t disappoint. The Holy See temple is a colossal structure. As many as six cake-like layers high, a long corridor branching off into various wings. The architecture is as motley as the religion’s dogma. Part pagoda, part european gothic, with a hint of mosque. The only constant is kitsch. Everything painted in garish pastel technicolor. Enamel dragons carved into flying balustrades, radiating around the singular symbol of an eye. The eye of God, the caodaists call it. Inside, the ceiling is painted like a starry sky. More gold-leaf and day-glo color schemes. Centerpiece is a massive glowing brass globe. Tinkling music should have been emanating from this place, powered by a little crank on a music box. But, for all of the plasticness of the temple, the unsettling part was the interaction between tourists and Caodaists. Flocks of tourists – myself included – snapping photographs from an upper balcony, whispering to each other with constipated looks on their faces as though trying to absorb the spirituality of this moment. Meanwhile the Caodaists are kneeling in their columns, noses pressed to the floor, then up again, raising their hands, singing their chants. It felt like some bad burlesque show. The performers draw an audience because they are freaks, the audience are freaks for being there. And neither party seems to be aware of their freakishness. Religion and tourism make a messy marriage.

Parts of Vietnam were beautiful, but the country frustrated me. There are seven or eight destinations that people come to Vietnam to see. Tourists travel between these attractions in air conditioned tourist buses that whisk you from a travel office in one city to the company’s corresponding travel office in the next. It’s a tourist conveyor belt. While it’s convenient not to have to think about bus stations or haggling with moto-taxi drivers or getting lost, this system makes for unrewarding travel. You know in gangster movies when a guy from one gang is brought to the other gang’s headquarters and they throw a hood over his head before putting him in the car so he can’t see the route? This is what traveling by tourist bus in Vietnam feels like. You are isolated from any part of the country that isn’t on the tourist path. And those places where the buses do stop have become diluted tourist circuses. Even more frustrating: those times when I did travel outside of the tourist infrastructure, I was ripped off by mototaxis and bus drivers, given misinformation, delivered to places I didn’t want to go. It felt sometimes like Vietnamese people had been ordered by the government to shepherd any stray travelers back to the tourist path, where they will spend more money. Many of the tunnel systems I wanted to see weren’t served by public transportation, or people told me they weren’t, so I would have to pay to get on a tour. You expect to be overcharged when traveling in less developed parts of the world. This is the nature of things – Westerners are the cash cow, moto-taximen are trying to make a living. There is a difference between shrewd business and insult. Everywhere I went in Vietnam, I met travelers sick of being swindled by the vietnamese. Guides collecting money for a full day tour, then dropping people at a bus station after two hours.  I didn’t realize until too late that the only way to properly travel through Vietnam is to buy a motorbike and do everything yourself. Oh well..

All of that said, I did have a few wonderful experiences.

Mekong Delta. The Mekong starts in Tibet, flows through China, Mynamar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and ends in the Delta in the south of Vietnam, flowing into the ocean through nine tributaries which give the river its name: River of Nine Dragons. I spent two days and a night drifting down this river. Narrow backwater jungle rivers lined with thatched huts on stilts. Sleepy little tributaries which feel like neighborhood streets. A few floating markets. Remarkable how every aspect of life takes place on this river; it is the lifeforce of the Delta people. Infrastructure is laid out according to the river. Electrical wires strung between branches on either side of a small tributary. Women in silk pajamas and conical hats pole their way across the river in slender flatboats. Larger longboats with eyes on the front that were painted in ancient times to scare crocodiles. Seventeen thousand offshoots in the delta, according to legend made under the feet of elephants. One of my more surreal tourism experiences occurred in a cage filled with water, labeled with a sign: “Crocodile Fishing, 5000 VND.” Pay 5000 Dong and you get a fishing pole with a piece of meat attached to it. Dangle this over the pool, crocodiles rise to the surface, and snap their jaws. When a crocodile clamps down on the meat, the bamboo pole bends, then snaps and everyone screams.

In Long Hai, a small beach village to the southwest of Saigon. I stumble upon a Tet party (Tet is Vietnamese New Year). This place is far from the tourist conveyor belt; I’m the only Westerner in town. So when I happen across this little party – a long table of food, lights strung up, karaoke machine blaring – they sit me at the head of the table, feed shrimp and pork. They open beer after beer for me. ‘Yo’ – ‘cheers’ – everyone barks, then drinks.  No one speaks English, so the village English teacher is brought in and she interviews me over the karaoke microphones and a sound system so everyone can hear. What is your name? Do you like President Obama? Are you married? Every time I open my mouth everyone cheers. There are people watching this from second story windows. I’m positive that for the rest of my life, I will never feel so good about myself. That was the peak right there. They asked me to sing a karaoke song. I have always been ideologically opposed to karaoke. But, as I said, all this cheering and chanting my name had me feeling pretty good. Given the choice between ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ and ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas,’ the audience chooses the holiday theme. ‘Good tidings we bring, to your and your kin, good tidings we bring…’ you know the one. My rendition was an act of carnage, but no one understood a word, and I received much applause.

Woke up at dawn in a little beach village called Mui Ne to go see the fishing market. Hundreds of idientical tourquise-black-yellow painted fishing boats, festooned with flags, tires and rolled-up nets hanging on the sides, bobbing in unison in the harbor. Fisherman rowing ashore from the fishing boats in large circular baskets. A pungent mixture of trash and fish. People haggling in twangy, rubbery Vietnamese, pointing to piles of shrimp or crabs laid out on tarps on the beach. Some standing waistdeep, others squatting back on their heels. Chickens running under legs of marketgoers and venders. Strange to see a chicken on a beach. Beautiful reflection: clusters of fishboats bobbing in the bay aligned with clusters of venders milling about on the beach. All moving with the same unhurried, languid grace. The sky and water an identical gray, rendering the horizon invisible.

Ha Long Bay. Sheer limestone karst formations rising abruptly out of calm blue-green waters.  In small lagoons are floating platforms with nets full of squids and crabs and fish for sale by the kilo. A relaxing boat ride through this bay made more interesting by the mix of nationalities in the tour group: two Iranian couples, an Israeli girl, an American-Palestinian. On the bus ride back, we figured out all of the problems and called it the Ha Long Bay Peace Convention.

Sicily, Underground

I was also working on my project in Palermo. My contact, through Katie, was a woman called Eugenia Manzella. We arranged to meet for the first time outside of my hostel on my second day in Palermo. I didn’t know anything about Eugenia except that she had helped with the History Channel shoot. She pulled up on a black scooter. About fifty-five years old, short hair, tan. She wore a black leather jacket, black helmet, jeans and boots. She also wore earrings and makeup. She would have fit in at a biker rally or a wine bar. Tough, but elegant. I would find out that she is sort of a guerilla archeologist in Palermo. Despite never studying archeology formally, she had convinced the city to fund a number of excavations in Capo, the historic neighborhood of the city. She did her work through CAI, Club Alpino Italiano, a group of speleology enthusiasts in Palermo. She handed me a helmet and I got on the back of the scooter. Riding on the back of any other fifty-five-year-old woman’s scooter may have been emasculating. But Eugenia was different. We took off through the narrow trap-like streets of Palermo. This would be the first of a number of excursions with Eugenia. I’ve talked before about my relationship with the people who have access to the places I want to see. The gatekeepers and guides. The Virgils. Eugenia would be ultimate Virgil in Palermo.

First, she took me to the outskirts of the city. Inside a warehouse-type building was a square landscape of rust-colored tuff rock. Dug out of the tuff was a grid of small depressions, each containing a skeleton. It was a necropolis. The excavated graves were about the size and shape of small bathtubs and the skeletons lay inside, legs slightly bent, bones embedded in the dry soil. Some only half preserved, others in perfect condition, every joint intact. You could see the various ceramic pots and talismans and other possessions with which each person had been buried. They were Pheonicians, dating back nearly 3000 years. Some graves had been left in-tact and we climbed down a set of stairs to peer inside the cocoon-like tombs.
Eugenia explained that this site was not one of her own projects, just a place she liked to visit. Walking between the tombs, she started telling me about the Phoenicians, how they lived, how they buried their dead. She spoke in flurries, a mixture of English and Italian; everything she said was accented with a sort of awe. After a certain point, she was no longer explaining for my benefit; she reminded me of a college professor on a blind tangent, forgetting the lecture hall of students taking notes. She finally said, as a sort of conclusion, “isn’t it just beautiful.” If it was a question, she sure didn’t need my affirmation. Seeing how passionate Eugenia was, it was no wonder she had inserted herself into the city’s archeological circle; I pitied the bureaucrat who tried to get in her way. Later, we would be walking down the street in Capo and, in the middle of telling me the history of a particular building, she came to an abrupt stop. When I turned to see what had distracted her, she was staring down at a seam in the pavement, a gap where two layers of concrete had split. I watched her toe at it with her boot, then get down on all fours to peer into the little hole. “This is how we find things,” she looked up with this child-like smile on her face. “We scratch at the ground. Scratch, scratch, always I am scratching.”

She took me further into the outskirts. Along the way,  she pointed out examples of Arab-Norman architecture; remnants of the Spanish rule; a type of palm tree that was infected with some invasive insect; a particularly good panifico. She knew every wrinkle of her city. We headed down a dirt road that bisected a citrus grove. Green mountains, which seem omnipresent in Sicily, rose up in the distance, half obscured in the haze of morning heat. Along one side of the road were ramshackle apartment buildings. We got off the scooter and Eugenia went to pick a few oranges; an old man in a wifebeater leaned out of his second-story window and yelled at her. Holding the oranges in either hand, she yelled back that these weren’t his oranges, she knew it for a fact. He grunted and disappeared from the window. She shrugged and tossed me an organge. I would recognize Eugenia’s toughness as unique among Sicilian women of a certain age, who tended to be their husbands’ wives, their children’s mothers. Ellie talked about the deference of Sicilian women; at dinner parties, women sit quietly or talk amongst themselves in low tones while the men drink and talk loudly. A few years ago, I would learn, Eugenia had divorced her husband, retired from her job at a bank and dedicated all of her time to unearthing the history of Palermo. She led me into a small non-descript bunker-like structure and got off the scooter. It turned out to be a sort of water pump building, but more importantly, it was a portal into the qanats of Palermo.
A qanat is a type of underground aqueduct system carved into the soft tuff beneath Palermo by the Arabs in the 12th century, back when Palermo was called Bal’harm. The qanat I would visit that day channeled water from a natural spring up in the mountains into the city proper of Palermo, underground all the way.
I stepped into the water pump building to find a large rectangular hole in the floor. A ladder led down into the darkness and there was some sort of rope pulley rigged above the hole. Just as Eugenia was explaining to me the structure of the qanat, a young man in bright yellow foul weather gear climbed loudly out of the portal and shook himself dry like a big dog. A few times a year, apparently, CAI gets a permit from the city to lead guided tours through the qanats. This was one of those days. Eugenia handed me a pair of big rubber boots and two other women came into the pump house, one carrying a thick yellow rain jacket, the other a gas torch helmet that I had seen explorers wearing in Paris. These two women both wore Forli Speleo Club t-shirts. The three of them made me hold out my arms as they dressed me in the jacket and helmet, fussing and clucking over clips and buckles. I either felt like a six-year-old boy about to go play in the rain, or some nobleman being attended to by his harem. (Considering the scooter arrangement, I’d probably say it was the former).
When I was properly outfitted, Eugenia started taking pictures of me in my gear, while Silvia, the younger of the two women, clipped me into a rope and caribeaner. Silvia lowered herself down onto the ladder, I came down after her. We descended about ten meters. When I stepped down from the last rung, I was in pitch darkness, straddling a channel of rushing water. Silvia helped me open the gas valve for my torch and a flame spurted from the bill of my helmet. The channel was narrow, the cielings a little more than six feet high, and the sound of the water, which moved quickly in places, reverberated loudly in the hollow space. We went sloshing through the running water, Silvia leading the way. She told me that speleology had been a hobby of hers since she was a little girl, when her father, also a speleo-type, first took her underground. As a girl, she had liked seeing how various cogs of her city’s infrastructure worked together underground – now she was a civil engineer. She had a good sense of humor. I kidded her about her nails, which were pearly pink, apparently freshly manicured. Silvia, manicures don’t belong underground, I told her. She turned around in her hardhat and headlamp. I’m still a lady, she said. The walls were a silty brown, roughhewn, with clunky looking bricks stacked in some places. In parts I could see fossilized sea shells embedded in the walls. We mucked around for about a half hour while I took some pictures, then made our way back to the ladder, where I was greeted by Eugenia.

The next day, I met Eugenia in the piazza which served as headquarters for her work. I found her standing near a small fruit stand in front of a church in the corner of the piazza. I noticed five or six guys sitting on plastic chairs nearby. The city, she explained, had given her a crew of workers to assist in the excavations. They were overweight, unshaven, gray scruff; they looked more like barflies than archeological assistants. A few smoked cigarettes in the shade of the canvas slung over the market, one who could’ve been Tony Danza’s older brother sat with his feet up on the bumper of a car, another lay on the hood with his eyes closed, arms crossed, apparently sunbathing. I almost started laughing. Then Eugenia said, Paolo, and I was amazed to see the guy on the hood of the car leap to his feet, ready for his orders. He made me think of John Malkovich as Lenny in Of Mice and Men. Big, sheepishly handsome, obedient. Eugenia would take me to a tunnel dug inside the wall of an old Norman fortress from 1500. Paolo would escort us as he had the keys to the fortress. Eugenia took my arm and we walked slowly through the labyrinthine cobbled streets on the way to  the fortress. She would stop in front of particular buildings and tell me the dates they were built, why they were significant. Below the playground of this primary school is a system of catacombs. The widows of the city were forced to walk back forth on this street because they were a threat to society. Beneath this street is one of the two rivers that once ran through the center of Palermo, until the city expanded and the Arabs built on top of them. These pipes jutting out of the wall were part of an Arab irrigation system. (“The Arabs were ingenius”). This market was the center of Palermo when the city was founded. Pointing down to various manholes: I have been down this one, and this one here many times.

When we got to the fortress, Paolo walked us along the outer battlements until we found a tiny opening cut into the stone. It was covered in a metal grate, which he unlocked. The tunnel was about 50 meters long, narrow, jaggedly cut. There were small slots carved into the rock walls from which the guards who patrolled this tunnel could fire guns. We wandered around for a little, Paolo hit his head once on the ceiling, and eventually we exited through the same door. On the walk back to the piazza, I began to think that it was time for me to leave Palermo. As wonderful as Eugenia was, I wasn’t sure the city was going to contribute any more to my project. The tunnel and the qanat had been interesting, but I was looking for spaces with some kind of narrative attached to them. The qanat and the defense tunnel were interesting feats of engineering, perhaps, but not exactly breeding grounds for legend.

I should have had more faith in Eugenia. Just as I was preparing to bid farewell to my guide, to thank her for showing me around Palermo and ask that she keep in touch, she said she wanted to show me one more thing, as though it had just occurred to her. She made her way toward the front door of the small church in the piazza and motioned for me to follow. She whistled to the bad news bears of archeology and five of them jumped up to assist her.

The church was modest inside: drafty, with a floor of cheap checkered marble and gray walls outlined in a strange peach color. She said something to her crew and pointed to the metal chairs arranged in rows in the middle of the floor. They moved the chairs and rolled back the red rug, revealing a metal door in the floor. Paolo and another guy lifed the door open and we stood looking at a set of stairs leading down into darkness. It was the church’s crpyt. Eugenia went down first and I followed. When my eyes adjusted, I found myself in some sort of mausoleum with an arched, low-slung ceiling supported by white pillars. Carved into the walls were large shelves. At the front of the room was some variation of an altar. Eugenia explained that this was one of the sites she had been studying. She led me into one of the back corners and showed me a plastic bin full of indistinct mud-caked objects. Bones, said Eugenia. The cavities lining the walls had once been used to hold corpses. She pointed out small holes in the corner of each cavity: a drainage point for the corpses’ internal fluids.
Apparently, she said, this crypt was one of the headquarters for the Beati Paoli.
She said it as though I should have recognized the phrase. I asked her what she meant.
She did not respond directly, but headed back up the stairs and into the church, motioning for me to follow. While Paolo and the rest of her workers closed the grate behind us, she led me to the purple marble altar at the front of the church and told me to look behind it. There was another excavation: a large hole in the floor behind the altar, dropping down about six feet. I turned to Eugenia.
Eugenia smiled and proceeded to tell me the story of the Beati Paoli.

The 15th and 16th centuries were a time of injustice and unrest in Palermo. The city was at the mercy of the fuedal aristocracy, a small group of extremely wealthy and corrupt men who held incorrigible political reign over the common people. Because the noblemen controlled the justice system, anyone who spoke out against the current regime would be convicted of treason and promptly jailed or executed. The common people of Palermo needed someone to step forward and protect them from this tyranny, to retaliate against the noblemen. This call was answered by an order of men known as the Beati Paoli.

The Beati Paoli – “Blessed Paulists” – were a Sicilian hybrid of Knights,  Freemasons and Japanese Ninjas. Wearing black hooded cloaks and masks to obscure their faces, and working under the cover of night, the Beati Paoli would meet in caverns or vaults under the streets of Palermo. They would discuss the plight of the city and orchestrate riots and coups against the regime. The group was spritual as well as political: they would perform occult rituals and conjurations in these caves. They acted as a vigilante ministry of justice, kidnapping evil noblemen, bringing them to trial in front of secret tribunals and torturing or executing them in underground grottoes. They traveled through the city via secret tunnels carved into the soft stone beneath the streets of Capo. When the police arrived at a Beati Paoli-orchestrated scene, the hooded men would slip into the nearest church. Beneath certain churches around the city were crypts in which the Beati Paoli would hide. Behind the altars of other churches were mouths of tunnels that ran for great distances underground. These tunnels, crypts, grottoes, underground tribunals were all linked in a massive underground honeycomb network. The Beati Paoli would flee from the police, vanish behind the altar of one church and reappear behind the altar of another church, halfway across the city.

No knows exactly where truth and myth intersect in the story of the Beati Paoli. The legend came into the popular consciousness with a historical novel by Luigi Natoli called I Beati Paoli. It was published serially in the Giornale di Sicilia in 1909, collected as a novel in 1921, then reprinted in 1949 (the subject matter was a little too subversive for the fascist regime, hence the gap). While Natoli fictionalized the story of the secret revolutionaries, he didn’t invent it. While no mainstream historian has verified anything about the Beati Paoli specifically, there is a great deal of evidence in favor of their existence. There were definitely covert sects who operated during the 16th-18th centuries; these groups incited riots and orchestrated kidnappings. In the early 1800s, writers were referencing the Beati Paoli in their work. Whether they actually executed noblemen or simply held secret meetings (which would have been quite dangerous in itself) is conjecture. What could not be denied were the concrete spaces that Palermitani now associate with the Beati Paoli.

I looked down into the hole behind the altar. It was not necessarily the mouth of a tunnel, though the color of the soil seemed to change near the bottom. There was no telling what was down there. They were just beginning this excavation, Eugenia told me. Then Eugenia told me of a man who had approached her about the excavation. He was older, more than eighty, she said. He had found it very interesting that she was working in this church and he proceeded to tell her a story. When he was a kid, maybe 10 years old, he worked as an altar boy in that church. One day, he and a friend were horsing around near the front of the church. Somehow, one of them knocked loose a piece of the wall behind the altar and they stood looking at a void behind the wall. They saw a passage of stairways leading down into the dark. But before they could enter more than a few feet, they heard someone enter the church and ran away before they were blamed for the damaged wall. However, the man told Eugenia one thing very specifically: he had felt a draft of air on his face coming from within the tunnel. For there to be any kind of air movement, this tunnel must have had multiple branches leading out to multiple openings. When I asked why they hadn’t found any sign of the steps, she explained that the church was keeping a close eye on the excavation; it was a delicate, slow-going process.
This story could be the invention of a senile imagination (though Eugenia insisted that he was reliable). It was certainly colored with the type of romance bred in underground legend. But once a story has been told, I suppose, it exists and can’t be ignored.

From the church, Eugenia lead me up a narrow cobbled street about a block away. At the back of a small courtyard were stairs leading down to a doorway that looked like it had just been excavated. The stairs led down to a small, circular, dome-shaped room of roughewn surfaces. Along the perimeter was a stone shelf, evidently some sort of bench. This space, Eugenia told me, was the setting of the secret tribunal in Natoli’s novel. At a number of points along the wall, Eugenia and her crew had begun excavations. A number of holes similar to the one behind the altar. No sign of tunnel mouths, but Eugenia explained that they were just beginning. The space could very well have been the setting for some sort of ritual. Perhaps a tribunal.

Later, Ellie, Daniella and I would visit another church in Capo which was apparently part of the tunnel network. In a dark corner of this church was a portrait of San Francesco di Paola, the man who was purportedly the patron saint of the Beati Paoli. He was a bearded man wearing a dark robe and in this  painting, he was surrounded by children who seemed to be caught in his orbit. Perhaps it was just the dark lighting of the church, but there was something depraved or sinister about him. Daniella – as only Daniella can do – befriended a man with somber eyes who was apparently the director of the church. She asked if we might be able to see the spaces behind the altar. I do not know exactly what was said, only that I heard the word ‘tunnel’ a number of times. He was reluctant at first, but finally caved. He took us through a door to the left of the altar, down a corridor lined with candles and into a dark room. He pointed to a heavy wooden door with a padlock on it. Behind this heavy door, he said to Daniella, is the tunnel. He said that he was not allowed to open it up. We asked again, but he was firm. As a consolation, he offered to show us the crypt. It was a space similar to the one Eugenia had shown me, but much larger, with more shelves for draining and embalming corpses. The space was cluttered and dusty: it looked as though no one had been down there for years. There were small nooks and crannies, half boarded-up. As with the tribunal, it was not difficult to imagine this space as a setting for any number of clandestine meetings. I frantically scribbled notes and snapped pictures with Daniella’s camera phone, as though I were uncovering some great secret. But the space could very well have been a derelict church crypt and nothing more. There was a strange reticence in the man as he showed us these things. He evaded any questions about the Beati Paoli. No straight answers.

Eugenia and her crew may be chasing myths in the underground of Palermo, or maybe they will eventually uncover these tunnels. But finding the intersection of folklore and history in the case of the Beati Paoli almost seems irrelevant. The Beati Paoli have become as tangible a part of Palermo’s history as the city’s very streets. Palermitani have wholly embraced the story of these revolutionaries. In Capo, you will find a square, a kiosk and a church, all named after the Beati Paoli. The story speaks to today’s generation as well: for three years in the early 2000s, the Giornale di Sicilia ran an updated Beati Paoli comic serial. In fact, to say that the story ‘speaks to’ the people of Palermo, may be the most apt articulation of the Beati Paoli’s relationship to the city. These men fight against the  for the justice of the dispossessed. Given the city’s history, it is not difficult to see why Palermitani – if not now, then 200 years ago – would embrace the story of these vigilantes. The Beati Paoli are superhero figures. They are Sicily’s Robin Hood.

One group detected public’s sympathy with this idea and used it to become the most powerful institution in Sicily: the mafia. Umberto Eco (who wrote the introduction to a 1984 reprinting of Natoli’s novel) describes the story of the  Beati Paoli as a charter myth for the mafia. The mafia established itself (one might say justified itself) on the ideology of the Beati Paoli. They presented themselves as ‘Men of Honor’ who could resolve the problems of the powerless within their own structure of justice. This seemed attractive to many Sicilian people at the time. The Cosa Nostra portray themselves as the descendants of Beati Paoli. When a mafioso called Antonio Calderone testified in court he explained that when he was initiated in Cosa Nostra, he was told that a mafioso should “follow the example of the Beati Paoli.” There are also stories about a confrontation in court between the Cosa Nostra godfather, Totò Riina, and Gaspare Mutolo, who had just snitched on him. In this first interaction, they addressed each other by the names of characters in Natoli’s novel. Even today, the Cosa Nostra and the Beati Paoli occupy a similar place in the Sicilian imagination. Both are semi-mythical secret societies; in a documentary I watched about the Beati Paoli, one man says it explicitly, “they’re mythical just like the mafia. I never met a mafioso.” The presence of both clans of men is implicit: constantly alluded to, but assumed rather than tangible. They vibrate below the surface, under cloaks. Beati Paoli meet in underground tribunals, while mafiosi meeting in smoky backrooms of restaurants. All of this is to say that the story of the Beati Paoli, be it truth or legend, is embedded in the Palermitan consciousness.

Sicily, Aboveground

I decided to go to Sicily on a whim. My friend Katie from Rome had just filmed an episode on Sicily for “Cities of the Underworld,” and she sent me a few email addresses of people to contact in Palermo. The original plan was to stay three or four days, check out some old Arabic aqueducts, maybe a mafia escape tunnel, then be on my way. I ended up staying for three weeks.

To travel by train to the island of Sicily from mainland Italy you must take a ferry, but not in the way you might expect. When the train approaches a port at the southern tip of the mainland, it does not stop at a platform, but continues directly to the edge of the Mediterranean. It follows the tracks up a ramp and through the open doors of a large boat. Once the train is fully onboard, the boat raises the access ramp, enclosing train and passengers in its bowels, then sets out for the island. For the passengers, the clacking rhythm of train ties is subsitituted for the gentle rock of waves. Upon arrival in the port of Messina, the front end of the boat unfolds, the train edges out, hooks back into the tracks and continues on its way. This surreal conveyance ended up being an appropriate passage into Sicily.

During my first few days, I met Ellie and Daniella, who would become the center of my time in Sicily. First, an artist from Brooklyn, Ellie, who had just returned from six months on a sailboat locked in the ice at the North Pole. She had been the artist in residence on a scientific expedition called Tara (I would later see the boat in port on the Seine). Ellie had come to Sicily looking for solitude while she worked on a video piece about the expedition. Ellie’s best friend was Daniella, a born-and-raised Palermitana who assisted an American artist living in Palermo. The three of us hit it off and were soon spending every day together. Daniella was our guide. She is a woman of indefatigable energy and magnetism who has a way of becoming the nucleus of every social situation (walking through Palermo with Daniella is like being escorted by the pope). She took Ellie and I on expeditions all over Sicily. We called her Virgilio. Walks along the beautiful mountainous coastline or junkets to a favorite gelato shop. At the time, I was re-reading Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which is all about travel and perception of place and how a single place contains many different incarnations and can transform according to one’s perspective. It is impossible to know how I would have experienced Sicily had I not met Daniella and Ellie. It seems like I fell for a version of Sicily as created by the three of us. In any case, something about this strange little island struck a chord with me and I look forward to returning.

A few of excursions:

We took a little boat out to a small island off the northwest coast called Mozia to see some Phoenician ruins going back to 800 BC. In the little archeology museum on this sleepy island we saw a two-meter-tall marble statue, called the boy of Mozia. We commented on this beatuiful statue to a man sitting in the same room, evidently a security guard. He told us that he had personally discovered the piece during the original excavation of the island. The man was small and quiet with a humble smile; I imagined him unearthing the statue while digging in his garden. There was something beautiful about him standing in an otherwise empty museum, keeping this 3000-year-old statue company as though spending time with a friend. He had a peaceful glow about him, as though in discovering such a treasure one attains enlightenment.

We visited Erice, a city perched on one of Sicily’s mountaintops. One can travel to Erice by a long winding road or by fifteen minute gondola ride. According to the myth, Erice is where Daedalus landed while his son Icarus continued flying towards the sun. It was a city of medieval stone and narrow cobbled streets. The air was crisp and the cobblestones were covered in moss, which seemed to muffle all sounds, leaving the city eerily silent. The view from the castle in Erice sprawled to the ocean on one side and, on the other, deep into a green countryside lined with roads like ribbons.

We had ate spanish salami-and-cheese sandwiches at Gibellina, a small village in the rolling highlands outside of Palermo which had been completely demolished by an earthquake in 1968. After the catastrophe, the mayor of Gibellina commissioned an artist, Alberto Burri, to build a monument in the village’s honor. On top of the ruins, the artist poured concrete. Then, retaining the original plan of the village streets, he sculpted six-foot-high uniformly shaped concrete slabs where the blocks of houses had been. It is the skeleton of Gibellina. The geometry of the village in-tact, the village itself a wasteland of austere concrete. On this gray day, with wind coming off the swelling hills, it seemed like the perfect memorial.

I also went to a place on the southern coast of Sicily called Agrigento (this is actually where I met Ellie). A cluster of dusty golden hills, Agrigento overlooks sweeping green valleys dotted with a patchwork of olive groves. Nestled at the bottom of one small canyon were the gardens of Kolymbetra. Here we found criscrossing streams and brooks and flora from all over the world, massive palm trees and ferns that seemed Jurassic. It almost unnerving how lush this place was; it felt unnatural, which is a sort of paradox. Especially we found trees laden with oranges and mandarins and lemons of every strand or blend imaginable. An embarassment of citrus. Sweet oranges, sour oranges, oranges blended with lime. We ate til we felt sick. Along the spine of the hill in Agrigento were three ancient greek temples, massive 2500-year-old columned structures of a golden clay color. Temples for Juno, Concordia, Olympian Zeus. Called ruins but still standing in almost perfect condition. We felt dwarfed standing next to these temples, as though their age added somehow to their bigness.

The terrain of Sicily is strange and beautiful: rolling, swelling, dramatic hills, one stretch seemingly incongruous to the next. I read The Leopard by Guisseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa while I was there. He describes the landscape: “comfortless and irrational, with no lines that the mind could grasp, conceived apparently in a delirious moment of creation; a sea suddenly petrified at the instant when a change of wind had flung waves into frenzy.” The irrationality of the landscape is reflected in the culture. Every day I spent in Sicily, it seemed I encountered another poignantly ironic or absurd wrinkle of Sicilian culture. Two fat, open-shirted, gold-chained Sicilian men get off their motorcycles, lift dark-visored helmets and kiss each other on the cheek. Palermo’s zona sacra (sacred zone), a grotto up in the mountains overlooking the city is ‘chiusa per caduti massi’ (closed because of falling rocks).  A man sells street food sandwiches comprised of some meat that he takes from a basket covered with a blanket. He slips his hand under the blanket and fishes around for the meat, as though it were still alive. ‘No one knows what it is,’ I am told by one of the ten people waiting for their sandwich. Too many of these moments to recount.

When we weren’t weaving through the dramatic hills of Sicily in Daniella’s little car, we were in Palermo. Palermo captivated me in a way few places have. The schizophrenic concoctions of Arab, Norman and Spanish architecture, mosques alongside gothic cathedrals. The shells of buildings left crumbling from the war that lend the city a feralness. The deep fried rice balls full of cheese and proscuitto called arrancine – eat one and you need a nap. The fountain in the middle of the city which generations of Palermitani have called the fountain of vergogna (shame) because of the lascivious glances exchanged by the nude sculptures seated on the fountain’s rim. The narrow streets patrolled by packs of vigilant street dogs. The hostel where I was living: an enormous tumbledown Liberty-style mansion in Capo with ill-lit tile hallways and many terraces and balconies. The fresh olive oil. The Sicilians’ elaborate lexicon of hand gestures, two-thirds of which are pantomimes for balls and assholes. The canoli. The Sicilian love of mythology – a recent Mafia sting was called Project Perseus, after the man who beheaded Medusa. The buzz of the markets. The Spassimo, a former church, now open-air ruin with a massive sumac tree growing at its center. The restaurant we went to every day, which, due to the visual prominence of the restroom, we called the Toilet Restaurant. Four euros for an appetizer, wine, and a big plate of pasta. The ceremony of Sicilian culture: the extended greetings, the unrushed pace of everything, even the bureaucracy has a charm (frustrating as hell, but charming). The city’s patchwork history: founded in 800 BC by the Phoenicians, ruled by the Carthaginians, the Greeks, the Romans, a number of Germanic tribes, the Arabs, the Normans, the Spanish, and, briefly, by the Austrians. Remnants all of these periods are layered in the streets (or sometimes beneath them). The anti-mafia store down the street, with a sign on the door announcing that they do not pay tribute to anyone. The city’s relationship with the mafia became a real fascination for me, especially after one day while walking through the market with Ellie, when I saw this (a snippet from a journal – excuse the punctuation):

ellie and i are walking through the market and we see a helicopter overhead. we ask someone what’s going on, a firefighter, and he sort of turns his back with an evasive shrug. we turn a corner and find a police blockade. carabinieri – who are like state troopers – are lined up, forming a cordon linked by batons, their backs to a crowd of people five or six deep. police cars parked everywhere haphazardly with siren lights pulsing, two helicopters circling. there are men wearing badges on dog chains and ski masks pulled over their faces. we wonder why these men are masked – hiding their identity from whom? there are people leaning out of apartment windows. on the edge of this square is the teatro massimo, the largest opera house in europe, which was closed for 25 years because for ‘renovations,’ (read: the mafia wanted it closed). when it opened this year, people were ecstatic, seeing it as a symbol of the ebb of mafia power. people are framed in the massive windows of this theater, watching whatever is happenings. i think about whether mob movies imitate life or if life imitates mob movies. within the area that has been cordoned off are reporters with microphones and tv cameramen, all in a frenzy. at the center are three large blue buses. ellie and i bounce on one foot then the other, trying to see what is going on. the most unnerving part of all of this is the silence. despite all the chaos within the circle no one in the crowd says a word. ellie and i are whispering to each other and feel self-conscious about disturbing people, or being overheard. ellie asks a few nearby men what is going on. in response, we get stoicism, always evasiveness. finally, we see all of the tv cameras turn towards the door of one building. apparently, this is the carabinieri headquarters. one man, old, grizzled, swarthy with a sneer on his face and his head bowed, is escorted in handcuffs by three policeman out of the building and onto the bus. staggered over the next twenty minutes, ten more men, each in cuffs with three police escorts. similarly ugly, gruff-looking. these, we find out later, are palermo mafia bosses. if the rest of the scene feels cinematic, this part has been miscast. no sign of henry hill; no tony soprano, tony montana. these men don’t look charismatic. no new jersey sweatsuits, no flash here. they’re brutes, their features are dark, disfigured, but not in any remarkable way. they are pedestrian in their ugliness. they walk to the bus without grace, shlumpy men in cheap clothes. they could be drunks picked off the street. they are remarkable only in their non-descriptness, their lack of distinction. men in the crowd wave to the men in cuffs. very subtle, almost delicate waves. no more than lifting a half-limp hand in the air. the kind of gesture from bidders at an auction. this seems to be their way of quietly saluting these bosses – certain people are here to support them. at one point, a woman in a velour tracksuit comes up behind us, fights her way to the front and starts sobbing. a man in long hair, unshaven, comes out in cuffs and she screams to him. ‘hansel! hansel!’ she moves in this sort of jarring, exaggerated, overwrought way, but maybe it just seems this way against the backdrop of so many people standing like statues. she starts speaking to him in sicilian gesture language, even as he is being put on the bus. again, this feels too cinematic to be real. another fifteen men are escorted onto buses. with all of their police escorts, they fill three buses. finally, when the third bus pulls away, everyone recognizes that this procession, this ceremony – for this is ultimately what it feels like – has reached its conclusion. people button their jackets, shake hands with the people nearby and move about their day. within ten minutes, the square is deserted. we find out later that this transportation of prisoners is the result of an anti-mafia sting called project perseus. the men escorted out of the carabinieri station were representatives of the three main mafia families in sicily. the police had caught word that the families were trying to consolidate or organize a bloc in order to reassert themselves. the sting was preventative. we found out later that the first man who was led out, who had bowed his head to evade tv cameras, was one of the main bosses. he had hung himself by his belt in jail that night.

Naples

The church of Pietrasanta, tucked between two buildings at the back of the little piazza where Dani, Luca and I sipped coffee, looked like any other church in Naples. A little older than other churches, perhaps, its paint chipped, the dome a weathered gray color, but otherwise inconspicuous. It did not, for example, look like a portal into an underground labyrinth of ancient aqueducts and cisterns.

Luca and his brother Dani run a website called Napoli Underground. I shot them an email before coming down to Naples from Rome and they said they would love to meet up. We arranged to meet one morning in the historical Spanish quarter of Naples. Luca, a wiry, narrow-shouldered man with a swarthy black beard, was waiting for me in the middle of Piazza Dante. At his feet was a rubber bag full of ropes and other gear. Dani, a fleshier, broader, baby-faced version of his younger brother, met us a few moments later. The two of them were born-and-raised in Naples. Luca worked as a webmaster for a website, Dani as a surgeon. Luca had been exploring underground in Naples for twenty years; his brother had only recently begun to tag along on excursions, but Dani admitted that he was “addicted to underground.” Both were affable guys and spoke some English; the three of us got along well.

When we finished our coffee, Dani and Luca led me into the church. On the way in, I asked Dani if the police ever gave them trouble for trespassing like the catacops do in Paris. He looked at me and said, “the police have other things to worry about in Naples.” I had been reading Gomorrah, the recent expose of the Neapolitan mafia, which recounted . I supposed that was a stupid question. We made our way into the basement of the church. Sprawled across the expansive concrete floor were shards of ceramics, presumably dredged from the spaces we were about to visit. In the back corner of the basement was a dilapidated staircase, and at the bottom of these stairs was a rectangular black hole. Propped against the edge of this hole was a rusty ladder that disappeared into darkness. This would be our entrance. First we strapped on our gear. Luca and Dani in caribbeaners, ropes, helmets, harnesses and suits with reflective piping. They looked like a hybrid of astronauts and deep sea divers. I was in jeans, an inside-out t-shirt, and a piece of rope tied like a primitive diaper around my crotch.

We began our descent. Down fifteen meters of the old concrete stairs, down another ten meters on the ladder. After a quick scramble up a wall of tuff rock, Luca pointed out a rabbit-sized hole that I hadn’t noticed. Into the tuff above the hole, he started driving stakes on which he would anchor ropes. I peered through the hole. It was a little window into the top of a large bottle-shaped space, the floor of which was a good fifteen meters down. When everyone was clipped in, we descended one-by-one. The only way to go through this rabbit-sized hole was backwards, feet-first, kicking blindly into the void. For a speleo-veteran, this is old hat. But I was a newbie, and for a moment, as I dangled by rope fifteen meters in the air, I wondered if Luca and Dani were trying to kill me. But, they weren’t (or at least they didn’t succeed) and I touched down safely. (‘Touchdown!’ Dani told me to say). From the ground, I admired the space where I found myself standing. It was an ancient cistern, a rounded cone shape reaching a tapered point twenty meters up. At about the three meter point was the old water-line where faded white ceramic met the copper-colored tufa. Before our descent, Luca had looked at me and said, “this is what I call the time machine.” Indeed, we were traveling back into time. Two and a half millenia back. When Ancient Greeks inhabited Naples – Neapoli, they called it – this cistern was one of many water tanks into which they would lower buckets and bring up fresh drinking water.

We spent the next five hours tromping through the dark underground of Naples. The brilliantly engineered underground water system became for Luca, Dani and I a sort of jungle gym or obstacle course. We flattened ourselves through dagger-narrow aqueducts and contorted our bodies like circus performers to squeeze through tiny passageways. We clambered up silty tuff walls, tip-toed along narrow ledges, lowered ourselves into caverns, always retracing the path of water that rushed through these channels so many centuries before. Luca and Dani showed me the long narrow chutes leading down from the surface through which the Greeks once brought up their water vessels. And the tracks of tiny holes running up the side of the tank walls, treacherous-looking footolds on which the Greek slaves who built these cisterns climbed up and down. We saw remnants from when the cisterns were used as bomb shelters during WWII. There was one space with a cross hanging on the wall, above what looked liked a makeshift altar. There was another with a toilet. Everywhere, lining the walls, were light fixtures and rusted wires. Shards of china were cast in the corners. Luca and Dani introduced me to the Wave Room of Isabela Marina (Luca’s daughter), an oblong cistern lined with watermarks oscillating in beautiful wave patterns. We ducked into previously unexplored passageways (appropriately labeled with spray-painted question marks) and ‘discovered’ two cisterns, helping Luca fill in the blanks on his map of Naples’s underworld.

Before coming to Naples, I had researched the city’s underground. I knew there were cisterns and bomb shelters. I had seen a short documentary about the spaces. But nothing could have prepared me for walking through these vast hollows, hearing my voice reverberate along the walls. Naples is a city of negative space: dark silent voids, all interconnected in a seemingly infinite network of passageways, all waiting to be explored. I have heard that there are 32 million square feet of underground space below Naples – only 40% of the city sits on solid ground. The spaces were so large that, sometimes, the headlamps wouldn’t reach the walls; you would lose your reference point and suddenly the space had no boundary. In these moments, the landscape felt lunar.

When it was time to return to the surface, we were tired and hungry, but all of us grinning with mud-smudged faces like kids after a satisfying adventure. For that afternoon, I was Dante; Luca and Dani were my two-headed Virgil. As I climbed back up the sagging rusty ladder, preparing to resurface in the basement of the church of Santapietra, Dani, standing at the foot of the ladder, recited the last line of The Inferno: ‘E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stele.’ (When we came out again, we saw the stars).

More Pictures of Naples, here.