The Winter Vault - Anne Michaels [3]
Earthworms a metre long churn the soil, white heather sways ten metres above a woman's head. Flowers more than three metres tall sweeten the sun, their scent merging with the fragrance of cloves off the sea from Zanzibar. Grass grows tall as a man, moss thick as the trunk of a tree. Bamboo clatters into the sky like an image on accelerated film – a pace of fifty centimetres a day.
This is the habitat of the mountain gorilla, an animal that with one arm can snap the head off a human but who fears water and will not cross the river.
The equatorial snow – this frozen moonlight, this salt, this mist – melts and gushes with the force of gravity over sixty-four thousand kilometres of jungle, swamp, and desert; it swells the Nile and stains its burning banks bright green. Snow that comes to flow through a landscape so hot that it wrings a man's dreams from his head, the mirage shimmering in the air; so hot that a man cannot gain a moment's respite from his own shadow or his own sweat; so hot that the sand dreams of becoming glass; so hot that men die of it. A landscape so arid that its annual rainfall barely fills four teaspoons.
The desert abandons anyone who lies down. From the moment a body is covered in sand, the wind, like memory, begins to exhume it. And so the Bedouin and other desert tribes dig deeper graves for their women, a discretion.
Perhaps this is another reason for the immensity of the desert tombs, the sheer weight and mass of rock hauled and piled – ingeniously piled, yet piled all the same – at the gravesites of the kings.
In the desert we remain still and the earth moves beneath us.
Each night the temperature fell to freezing and the labourers began their day around the fire. By early morning one paid a price for even the slightest exertion. No one was seen to sweat because any moisture evaporated instantly. Men dipped their heads into whatever shade could be found, squeezed into the shadows of wooden crates and trucks. They gazed with desire across the Nile at the umbra of dom and date palms, acacias, tamarisk, and sycamore. Their faces sought the north wind.
Each morning from the houseboat, Jean watched Avery disappear into the throng of men. All around him, faces the colour of wet earth; Avery, pale as the sand. Soon she would climb to the plateau where a garden had been started, irrigated by the same pipes that provided water for the camp's swimming pool, and begin her lessons on desert fruits from the wife of one of the Cairo engineers, a gracious source of information – from recipes to plant medicines and cosmetics – who wore an elegant white shirt-dress to the garden, with white sandals, her hair elaborately sculpted and pinned under a white straw hat. She directed Jean, who was happy to sink her knees and hands into the work.
All day the temple rock absorbed the sunlight; any gap between the blocks trapped the heat like a clay oven. Then, each evening, the stone slowly cooled. Visitors came to experience Abu Simbel at dawn. But Jean knew that the true miracle of the temple was only revealed at dusk when, for one brief twilit hour, the great colossi came to life, stone lips and limbs cooling exactly to the temperature of skin.
One day, three hundred thousand years ago, one of our hominid ancestors in Berekhat Ram leaned down to pick up a tuff of volcanic rock whose shape, by chance, resembled a woman. Then another stone was used to deepen the naturally formed line between “head” and “neck” and between “arm” and “torso.” This is the earliest example of stone made flesh.
In paleolithic Britain, a hunter chipped a handaxe out of flint, taking care not