The Rings of Saturn

by W. G. Sebald

  and for centuries was the foremost bastion against the constant threat of invasion. Not until Napoleon was contemplating the conquest of the British Isles—his engineers audaciously planning to dig a tunnel under the Channel, and envisaging an armada of hot-air balloons advancing on the English coast—were new defensive measures taken, with the building of martello towers along the seashore, a mile or so apart. There are seven of these circular forts between Felixstowe and Orford alone. To the best of my knowledge, their effectiveness was never put to the test. The garrisons were soon withdrawn, and ever since these masonry shells have served as homes for the owls that make their soundless flights at dusk from the battlements. In the early Forties, the scientists and technicians at Bawdsey built radar masts along the east coast, eerie wooden structures more than eighty yards high which could sometimes be heard creaking in the night. No one knew what purpose they served any more than they knew about the many other secret projects then being pursued in the military research establishments around Orford. Naturally this gave rise to all manner of speculation about an invisible web of death rays, a new kind of nerve gas, or some hideous means of mass destruction that would come into play if the Germans attempted a landing. And it is a fact that until recently a file labelled Evacuation of the Civil Population from Shingle Street, Suffolk was in the archives of the Ministry of Defence, embargoed for seventy-five years as distinct from the usual practice of releasing documents after thirty, on the grounds that (so the irrepressible rumours claimed) it gave details of a horrifying incident in Shingle Street for which no government could accept public responsibility. I myself heard, for instance, that experiments were conducted at Shingle Street with biological weapons designed to make whole regions uninhabitable. I also heard tell of a system of pipes extending far out to sea, by means of which a petroleum inferno could be unleashed with such explosive rapidity, in the event of an invasion, that the very sea would start to boil. In the course of the preparatory experimentations, an entire company of English sappers were said to have met their deaths, inadvertently as it were, in the most appalling manner, according to eye witnesses who claimed to have seen the charred bodies, contorted with pain, lying on the beach or still out at sea in their boats. Others maintain that those who died in the wall of fire were German landing forces wearing English uniforms. When access to the Shingle Street following a lengthy campaign was finally granted in 1992 in the local press, it revealed nothing that might have justified the top-secret classification, or

  substantiated the stories that had been circulating since the end of the war. But it seems likely, one commentator wrote, that sensitive material was removed before the file was opened, and so the mystery of Shingle Street remains. —Presumably part of the reason why rumours like this one concerning Shingle Street endured so obstinately was that, during the Cold War era, the Ministry of Defence continued to maintain Secret Weapons Research Establishments on the coast of Suffolk, and imposed the strictest silence on the work carried out in them. The inhabitants of Orford, for example, could only speculate about what went on at the Orfordness site, which, though perfectly visible from the town, was effectively no easier to reach than the Nevada desert or an atoll in the South Seas. For my part, I well recall standing down by the harbour when I first visited Orford in 1972 and looking across to what the locals simply called "the island", which resembled a penal colony in the Far East. I had been studying the curious coastal land formations at Orford on the map, and was interested in the promontory of Orfordness, which seemed to have an extraterritorial quality about it. Stone by stone, over a period of millennia, it had shifted down from the north across the mouth of the River Alde, in such a way that the tidal lower reaches, known as the ore, run for some twelve miles just inside the present coastline before flowing into the sea. When I was first in Orford, it was forbidden to approach "the island", but now there was no longer any obstacle to going there, since, some years before, the Ministry of Defence had abandoned secret research at that site. One of the men sitting idly on the harbour wall offered to take me over for a few pounds and fetch me later after I had had a look around. As we crossed the river in his blue-painted boat, he told me that people still mostly avoided Orfordness. Even the beach fishermen, who were no strangers to solitude, had given up night-fishing out there after a few attempts, allegedly because it wasn't worth their while, but in reality because they couldn't stand the god-forsaken loneliness of that outpost in the middle of nowhere, and in some cases even became emotionally disturbed for some time. Once we were on the other side, I took leave of my ferryman and, after climbing over the embankment, walked along a partially overgrown tarmac track running straight through a vast, yellowing field. The day was dull and oppressive, and there was so little breeze that not even the ears of the delicate quaking grass were nodding. It was as if I were passing through an undiscovered country, and I still remember that I felt, at the same time, both utterly liberated and deeply despondent. I had not a single thought in my head. With each step that I took, the emptiness within and the emptiness without grew ever greater and the silence more profound. perhaps that was why I was frightened almost to death when a hare that had been hiding in the tufts of grass by the wayside started up, right at my feet, and shot off down the rough track before darting sideways, this way, then that, into the field. It must have been cowering there as I approached, heart pounding as it waited, until it was almost too late to get away with its life. In that very fraction of a second when its paralysed state turned into panic and flight, its fear cut right through me. I still see what occurred in that one tremulous instant with an undiminished clarity. I see the edge of the grey tarmac and every individual blade of grass, I see the hare leaping out of its hiding-place, with its ears laid back and a curiously human expression on its face that was rigid with terror and strangely divided; and in its eyes, turning to look back as it fled and almost popping out of its head with fright, I see myself, become one with it. Not till half-an-hour later, when I reached the broad dyke that separates the grass expanse from the pebble bank that slopes to the shoreline, did the blood cease its clamour in my veins. For a long while I stood on the bridge that leads to the former research establishment. Far behind me to the west,

  scarcely to be discerned, were the gentle slopes of the inhabited land; to the north and south, in flashes of silver, gleamed the muddy bed of a dead arm of the river, through which now, at low tide, only a meagre trickle ran; and ahead lay nothing but destruction. From a distance, the concrete shells, shored up with stones,

  in which for most of my lifetime hundreds of boffins had been at work devising new weapons systems, looked (probably because of their odd conical shape) like the tumuli in which the mighty and powerful were buried in prehistoric times with all their tools and utensils, silver and gold. My sense of being on ground intended for purposes transcending the profane was heightened by a number of buildings that resembled temples or pagodas,

  which seemed quite out of place in these military installations. But the closer I came to these ruins, the more any notion of a mysterious isle of the dead receded, and the more I imagined myself amidst the remains of our own civilization after its extinction in some future catastrophe. To me too, as for some latter-day stranger ignorant of the nature of our society wandering about among heaps of scrap metal and defunct machinery, the beings who had once lived and worked here were an enigma, as was the purpose of the primitive contraptions and fittings inside the bunkers, the iron rails under the ceilings, the hooks on the still partially tiled walls, the shower heads the size of plates, the ramps and the soakaways. Where and in what time I truly was that day at Orfordness I cannot say, even now as I write these words. All I do know is that I finally walked along the raised embankment from the Chinese Wall bridge past the old pumphouse towards the landing stage, to my left in the fading fields a collection of black Nissen huts, and to my right, across the river, the mainland. As I was sitting on the breakwater waiting for the ferryman, the evening sun
emerged from behind the clouds, bathing in its light the far-reaching arc of the seashore. The tide was advancing up the river, the water was shining like tinplate, and from the radio masts high above the marshes came an even, scarcely audible hum. The roofs and towers of Orford showed among the tree tops, seeming so close that I could touch them. There, I thought, I was once at home. And then, through the growing dazzle of the light in my eyes, I suddenly saw, amidst the darkening colours, the sails of the long-vanished windmills turning heavily in the wind.

  9

  After Orford, I headed inland travelling on one of the Eastern Counties Omnibus Company's red buses, going through Woodbridge to Yoxford where I set out on foot in a north-westerly direction along the old Roman road, into the thinly populated countryside that lies to the south of Harleston. I walked for nearly four hours, and in all that time I saw nothing apart from harvested cornfields stretching away into the distance under a sky heavy with clouds, and dark islands of trees surrounding the farmsteads which stood well back from the road, a mile or two apart from each other. I encountered hardly any vehicles while treading this seemingly unending straight, and I knew then as little as I know now whether walking in this solitary way was more of a pleasure or a pain. At times on that day, which I recall as being both leaden and unreal, a gap would open up among the billowing clouds. Then the rays of the sun would reach down to the earth, lighting up patches here and there and making a fan-shaped pattern as they descended, of the sort that used to appear in religious pictures symbolizing the presence above us of grace and providence. It was afternoon by the time I came to the lane which leaves the Roman road across a cattle grid and leads through a meadow to Chestnut Tree Farm, an ancient moated house, where Thomas Abrams has been working on a model of the Temple of Jerusalem for a good twenty years. Now in his early sixties, Thomas Abrams has been a farmer all his life. He took to model-making soon after he left the village school, and like many of his kind he would spend the long winter evenings glueing little pieces of wood together to build all sorts of barques and sailing boats and famous ships such as the Cutty Sark and the Mary Rose. This pastime soon developed into a passion, and together with the interest he had long taken, as a Methodist lay preacher, in the factual basis of Biblical history, it gave him the idea, one evening towards the end of the Sixties, just as he was bedding the farm animals down for the night (so he told me), of recreating the Temple of Jerusalem exactly as it was at the beginning of our time. —Chestnut Tree Farm is a silent and somewhat sombrous place. Never yet, on my many visits, having come along the lane and crossed the little bridge over the moat to go up to the house, have I found anyone about. Even tapping with the heavy brass knocker brings nobody to the door. The big chestnut tree in the front yard, which must be several hundred years old, is motionless. Even the ducks on the water in the moat do not stir. If one takes a look inside through the window, it seems as if the mirror-bright dining table, the mahogany chest of drawers, the armchairs of burgundy red velvet, the hearth, and the ornaments and china figurines set out on the mantelpiece, had been drowsing there undisturbed for ever, so that one might well think that the owners have departed or died. But just as one is about to turn away, having waited and listened a while and feeling that one must have come at an inopportune moment, one sees Thomas Abrams waiting a little way off. And that is just how it was when I arrived there on foot from Yoxford on that late summer afternoon. As always, Thomas Abrams was wearing his green overalls and watchmaker's glasses. We exchanged a few words of no consequence as we walked to the barn in which the Temple was now nearing completion. Owing, however, to the size of the model, which covers nearly ten square yards, and to the minuteness and precision of the individual pieces, this process of completion is going so slowly that it is difficult to see any change from one year to the next, even though Thomas Abrams has almost given up farming, he told me, in order to be able to devote most of his time to the building of the Temple. He had just a few animals left, he said, and that more out of affection than any wish to profit from them. As I must have seen, the broad arable fields around the house had all been put back to pasture, and the standing hay was sold to one of his neighbours. It was ages since he had last driven a tractor. Hardly a day now passed that he did not work on the Temple for at least an hour or two. He had spent the past month painting about a hundred of the more than two thousand figures, no more than a quarter of an inch high, that peopled the Temple precincts. Then there are the alterations that need to be made, Thomas Abrams said, whenever my research leads to new findings. It is well known that archaeologists are divided amongst themselves as to the exact layout of the Temple; nor are my own often hard-gained insights always more reliable than the views of the squabbling scholars, even though my model is now thought to be the most accurate replica of the Temple ever produced. Thomas Abrams told me that he now received visitors from all over the world, historians from Oxford and Jehovah's Witnesses from Manchester, archaeological experts from the Holy Land, ultraorthodox Jews from London and representatives of evangelist sects from California, who had put to him the proposition that a full-size replica of the Temple should be built in the Nevada desert under his instructions. Various television companies and publishers were seeking to entice him, and Lord Rothschild had even offered to house the completed Temple in the entrance hall of his mansion near Aylesbury, and grant access to the public. The only advantage which had accrued to him personally as a result of the interest created by his work was that his neighbours, together with those members of his own family who had more or less openly expressed their doubts about whether he was of sound mind, were now a little more restrained in their disparaging comments. He could quite understand, said Thomas Abrams, how easy it was to consider someone barmy, who for so many years immersed himself deeper and deeper into a fantasy world and spent his time in an unheated barn fiddling about with such an apparently never ending, meaningless and pointless project, particularly when that same person was failing to look after his fields and to collect the subsidies he was entitled to. While the opinion of his neighbours, who had become fat on the senseless Brussels agricultural policy, had never concerned him that much, the fact that it must have at times have seemed to his wife and children that he was out of his mind was something that weighed on him rather more than he admitted. And so, he said, the day that Lord Rothschild drove into my yard in his limousine was indeed an important turning point in my life, because ever since then even the family have looked on me as a scholar engaged in serious study. On the other hand, of course, the constantly growing number of visitors keeps me from my work, and the work that still remains to be done is enormous. You might well say that because of my increasingly accurate knowledge, the task now seems in every respect more difficult to complete than ten or fifteen years ago. One of the American evangelists once asked me whether the Temple was inspired by divine revelation. And when I said to him it's nothing to do with divine revelation, he was very disappointed. If it had been divine revelation, I said to him, why would I have had to make alterations as I went along? No, it's just research really and work, endless hours of work, Thomas Abrams said. You had to study the Mishnah, he continued, and every other available source, and Roman architecture, and the distinctive features of the edifices raised by Herod in Masada and Borodium, because that was the only way of arriving at the right ideas. In the final analysis, our entire work is based on nothing but ideas, ideas which change over the years and which time and again cause one to tear down what one had thought to be finished, and begin again from scratch. I would more than likely never have started building the Temple if I had had any notion of how my work would get out of hand, and of the demands it would make on me as it became ever more complex. After all, if the Temple is to create the impression of being true to life, I have to make every one of the tiny coffes on the ceilings, every one of the hundreds of columns, and every single one of the many thousands of diminutive stone blocks by hand, and paint them as well. Now, as the edges of my fie
ld of vision are beginning to darken, I sometimes wonder if I will ever finish the Temple and whether all I have done so far has not been a wretched waste of time.

  But on other days, when the evening light streams in through this window and I allow myself to be taken in by the overall view, then I see for a moment the Temple with its antechambers and the living quarters of the priesthood, the Roman garrison, the bath-houses, the market stalls, the sacrificial altars, covered walkways and the booths of the moneylenders, the great gateways and staircases, the forecourts and outer provinces and the mountains in the background, as if everything were already completed and as if I were gazing into eternity. In closing, Thomas Abrams dug out a magazine from under a pile of papers and showed me a double-page aerial view of the Temple precinct as it is today: white stones, dark cypresses, and in the centre, the golden Dome of the Rock, which immediately brought to mind the dome of the new Sizewell reactor, which can be seen on moonlit nights shining like a shrine far across the land and sea. The Temple, Thomas Abrams said as we left his workshop, endured for only a hundred years. Perhaps this one will last a little longer. On the bridge over the moat, where we lingered for a while, Thomas Abrams told me how much he liked the ducks, a couple of which were quietly paddling around in the water and snapping up the food which he now and then took out of the pocket of his overalls and threw down for them. I have always kept ducks, he said, even as a child, and the colours of their plumage, in particular the dark green and snow white, seemed to me the only possible answer to the questions that are on my mind. That is how it has been for as long as I can remember. As I took my leave and mentioned that I had walked over from Yoxford and was now going on to Harleston, Thomas said that he would drive me as he had an errand in town anyway. So we spent the quarter of an hour to Harleston sitting side by side in the cab of his truck, and I wished that the short drive through the country would never come to an end, that we could go on and on, all the way to Jerusalem. But instead I had to get out at the Saracen's Head in Harleston, an inn several centuries old whose guest rooms, as it transpired, were furnished with the most fearful pieces one can imagine. The headboard of the pink bed consisted of a black marbled formica construction nearly five feet high, with various drawers and compartments, rather like an altar; the thin-legged dressing-table was lavishly decorated with gold arabesques; and the mirror, which was fitted into the door of the wardrobe, made one look strangely deformed. As the wooden floorboards were very uneven and sloped towards the window, all the furniture stood at something of a tilt, so that I was pursued even while asleep by the feeling that the house was about to fall down. It was therefore with a certain relief that I left the Saracen's Head the following morning and walked eastward out of the town into the open fields. The stretch of land which I now traversed in a wide arc was no more densely populated than the one I journeyed through on the previous day. Every couple of miles there is a hamlet, and without exception these hamlets are named after the patron saints of their churches: St Mary and St Michael, St Peter, St James, St Andrew, St Lawrence, St John and St Cross, and as a result the people living there call the entire area The Saints. They say such things as: He bought land in The Saints, clouds are coming up over The Saints, that's somewhere out in The Saints and so on. My own feeling, as I walked over the featureless plain, was that I might well lose my bearings in The Saints, so often was I forced to change direction or strike out across country due to the labyrinthine system of footpaths and the many places where a right of way marked on the map had been ploughed up or was now overgrown. A couple of times I began to think I was lost, but then, around noon, I saw my goal, the round tower of the church of Ilketshall St Margaret, appear in the distance. Half an hour later I was sitting leaning against one of the gravestones in the cemetery of that parish, whose souls number no more today than in the Middle Ages. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century parsons who were the incumbents of such remote livings usually dwelt with their families in the nearest small town and drove out into the country by pony cart just once or twice a week in order to hold services and make a few calls. One such vicar of Ilketshall St Margaret was the Reverend Ives, a mathematician and Hellenist of some standing, who lived with his wife and daughter in Bungay and was said to have liked his glass of sparkling Canary wine at dusk. During the summer of 1795 they were visited every day by a young French nobleman who had fled to England to escape the terrors of the Revolution. Ives talked with him about Homer's epics, Newton's mathematical theories, and the journeys which both of them had made in America. What great expanses that continent covered, and how immense the forests were, with trees whose trunks towered higher than the pillars of the tallest cathedrals! And the plunging waters of Niagara—what did their eternal thunder mean if there were not also someone standing at the edge of the cataract conscious of his forlornness in this world. Charlotte, the rector's fifteen-year-old daughter, would listen to these conversations with growing fascination, especially when their distinguished guest conjured up pictures in which warriors adorned with feathers appeared, and Indian maidens about whose dark skin there was a touch of moral pallor. Once she was so overcome with emotion that she ran out quickly into the garden on hearing of a hermit's good dog that led one such maiden, in her heart already a Christian, safely through the dangerous wilderness. When the teller of the tale later asked her what it was in his account that had so moved her, Charlotte answered that it was mainly the image of the dog carrying a lantern on a stick in his mouth, lighting the way through the night for the frightened Atala. It was always such little details rather than the lofty ideas that went straight to her heart. In the manner of such things, it was surely inevitable that the Viacomte, who was exiled from his homeland and undoubtedly surrounded by the aura of a romantic hero in Charlotte's eyes took on the rule of tutor and confidant as the weeks went by. Whilst it goes without saying that she practised her French, by taking dictation and engaging in conversation, Charlotte also asked her friend to devise more extensive courses of study for her, to include antiquity, the topography of the Holy Land, and Italian literature. They spent long hours in the afternoon together reading Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata and the Vita Nuova, and in all likelihood there were times when the young girl's throat flushed scarlet and the Vicomte felt the thuds of his heartbeat right under his jabot. Their day always ended with a music lesson. When dusk was settling inside the house, but the light streaming in from the west still lit the garden, Charlotte would play some piece or other from her repertoire, and the Vicomte, appuyé au bout du piano, would listen to her in silence. He was aware that their studies brought them closer every day, and, convinced that he was not fit to pick up her glove, sought to conduct himself with the utmost restraint, but nonetheless remained irresistibly drawn to her. With some dismay, as he later wrote in his Mémoires d'outre-tombe, I could foresee the moment at which I would be obliged to leave. The farewell dinner was a sad occasion during which no one knew what to say, and when it was over, much to the astonishment of the Vicomte, it was not the father but the father who withdrew with Charlotte to the drawing room. Although he was on the point of departure, the mother—who, the Vicomte noticed, was herself most seductive in the unusual role which she was now playing in the teeth of convention—asked his hand in marriage for her daughter, whose heart, she said, was entirely his. You no longer have a native country, your property has been disposed of, your parents are no longer alive: what could possibly take you back to France? Stay here with us and be our adopted son and heir. The Vicomte, who could scarcely believe the generosity of this offer made to an impoverished emigrant, was thrown into the greatest conceivable inner turmoil by her proposal, which it seemed the Reverend Ives had approved. For while on the one hand, he wrote, he desired nothing so much as to be able to spend the rest of his life unknown to the world in the bosom of this solitary family, on the other hand the melodramatic moment had now come when he would have to disclose the fact that he was married. While the alliance he had entered into in France had
been arranged by his sisters almost without consulting him and had remained a mere formality, this did not in the slightest alter the untenable situation in which he now found himself. Mme Ives had put her offer to him with her eyes half downcast, and when he responded with the despairing cry Arrêtez! Je suis marié! she fell into a swoon, and he was left with no other choice than to leave that hospitable house at once with the resolution never to return. Later, setting down his memories of that ill-omened day, he wondered how it would have been if he had undergone the transformation and led the life of a gentleman chasseur in that remote English county. It is probable that I should never have written a single word. In due course I should have even forgotten my own language. How great would France's loss have been, he asks, if I had vanished into thin air like that? And would it not, in the end, have been a better life? Is it not wrong to squander one's chance of happiness in order to indulge a talent? Will what I have written survive beyond the grave? Will there be anyone able to comprehend it in a world the very foundations of which are changed? —The Vicomte wrote these words in 1822. He was now the ambassador of the French king at the court of George IV. One morning, when he was sitting working in his study, his valet announced that a Lady Sutton had arrived in her carriage and wished to speak to him. When this strange caller crossed the threshold, accompanied by two boys aged about sixteen who, like herself, were in mourning, he had the impression that she found it difficult to remain upright owing to some inner agitation. The Vicomte took her by the hand and led her to an armchair. The two boys stood by her side. And the lady, speaking in a quiet, broken voice as she brushed back the black silk ribbons that hung from her bonnet, said: My lord, do you remember me? And I, the Vicomte wrote, recognised her. After twenty-seven years I was sitting at her side again, the tears swelled up in my eyes, and I saw her, through the veil of those tears, exactly as she had been during that summer which had long sunk into the shades of memory. Et vous, Madame, me reconnaissez-vous? I asked her. She did not reply, however, but looked at me with such a sad smile that I realized that we had meant far more to each other than I had admitted to myself at the time. —I am in mourning for my mother, she said; my father died years ago. As she said this, she withdrew her hand and covered her face. My children, she continued after some time, are the sons of Admiral Sutton, whom I married three years after you left us. You must excuse me now. I cannot say any more today. —She took my arm, the Vicomte writes in his memoirs, and as I led her through the house, down the stairs and back to her carriage, I held her hand against my heart and could feel that she was trembling. She drove off with her two dark-haired boys sitting opposite her like two mute servants. Quel bouleversement des destinées! Over the next few days, the Vicomte writes, I visited Lady Sutton four times at the address in Kensington that she had given me. On none of these occasions were her sons at home. We talked and were silent, and with each Do you remember? our past life rose more clearly from the cruel abyss of time. On my fourth visit, Charlotte asked me to put in a good word with george Canning, who had just been made Governor-General of India, for the elder of her two sons, who planned to go to Bombay. It was solely on account of this request, she said, that she had come to london, and she must now return to Bungay. Farewell! I shall never see you again! Farewell! —After this painful parting I spent long hours shut away in my study at the embassy and, with repeated interruptions for vain reflection and brooding, committed our unhappy story to paper. As I did so, I was troubled by the question of whether in the writing I should not once again betray and lose Charlotte Ives, and this time for ever. But the fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and so unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight. Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life. How often this has caused me to feel that my memories, and the labours expended in writing them down are all part of the same humiliating and, at bottom, contemptible business! And yet, what would we be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere never-ending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past. How wretched this life of ours is! —so full of false conceits, so futile, that it is little more than the shadow of the chimeras loosed by memory. My sense of estrangement is becoming more and more dreadful. When I walked in Hyde Park yesterday, I felt unspeakably wretched and outcast amongst the colourful crowd. As if from afar, I watched the beautiful young English women with the same bewilderment of my senses that I used to feel in an embrace. And today I do not raise my eyes from my work. I have become almost invisible, to some extent like a dead man. Perhaps that is why it appears to me that this world which I have very nearly left behind is shrouded in some peculiar mystery.