At Home - Bill Bryson [202]
• CHAPTER XVII •
THE DRESSING ROOM
I
Toward the end of September 1991, two German hikers, Helmut and Erika Simon of Nuremberg, were making their way along a glacier high in the South Tyrolean Alps, at a place called the Tisenjoch Pass, on the border of Austria and Italy, when they happened upon a human body protruding from the ice at the glacier’s edge. The body was leathery and severely emaciated but intact.
The Simons made a two-mile detour to a manned hut at Similaun to report their discovery. Police were summoned, but when they arrived it quickly became apparent that this was a matter not for them but for prehistorians. With the body were personal effects—a copper ax, a flint knife, arrows, and a quiver—that connected the man to a much earlier, more primitive age.
Subsequent radiocarbon dating showed that the man had died over five thousand years ago. He was quickly nicknamed Ötzi, after the nearest major valley, the Ötztal; others called him the Iceman. Ötzi had not only a full range of tools but also all his clothing. Nothing so complete and ancient had ever been found before.
Contrary to common assumption, bodies that fall into glaciers almost never pop out at the terminal end in an impeccably preserved state. Glaciers grind and churn with slow but brutal force, and any bodies within them are generally crushed to molecules. Very occasionally they are stretched to outlandish lengths, like characters flattened by a steamroller in a cartoon. If no oxygen gets to the body, it may undergo a process called saponification, in which the flesh transmutes into a waxy, foul-smelling substance called adipocere. Such bodies look eerily as if they have been carved from soap and lose nearly all meaningful definition.
Ötzi’s body was preserved as well as it was through a combination of unusually favorable circumstances. First, he died in the open on a day that was dry but with the temperature falling swiftly: effectively, he was freeze-dried. Then he was covered by a series of dry, light snowfalls, and probably stayed in that perfectly frigid state for years before the glacier slowly claimed him. Even then he remained in an outlying eddy that saved him—and, no less important, his possessions—from being dispersed and crushed. Had Ötzi died a few steps closer to the glacier or a little lower down the slopes or in drizzle or sun, or in almost any other circumstances, he would not be with us now. However ordinary Ötzi may have been in life, in death he became the very rarest of corpses.
What made Ötzi uniquely exciting was that this was not a burial, with personal possessions thoughtfully arranged about him, but a person found straight from life, with the day-to-day items he had on him when he died. Nothing like that had ever been found before, and it was almost wholly undone by four days of overexuberant recovery efforts. Passersby and sightseers were allowed to take turns hacking away at the ice that held the body. One well-meaning helper seized a stick and tried digging with it, but it snapped in two. “The stick,” the National Geographic reported, “turned out to be part of the hazel-wood and larch-wood frame of the Iceman’s backpack.” The volunteers, in short, were trying to dig out the corpse using his own priceless artifacts.
The case was dealt with by Austrian police, and the body, once freed, was whisked away to a refrigerator in Innsbruck. But a subsequent GPS investigation showed that in fact Ötzi had been just inside Italian territory when found, and after some legal wrangling the Austrians were ordered to surrender their treasured body, and Ötzi was driven over the Brenner Pass to Italy.
Today Ötzi lies on a slab in a refrigerated room in the archaeological museum in Bolzano, a German-speaking city in the north of Italy. His skin, the color and texture of fine leather, is stretched tight across his bones. His face wears an expression that looks very like weary resignation. Since being hauled