John Masters

by The Rock

The Greeks came to share in the trade; and about 2800 B.C. the Minoans, who brought with them and left in Spain a deep-rooted belief of their religion: bull worship. The trade went beyond Spain to England and beyond copper to tin, and soon copper and tin were being melted together to make a new harder and tougher metal—bronze. The Age of Bronze was born close to the Rock, and the Iron Age followed from the same womb, for Tarshish contributed large iron ore deposits, too.

  Several peoples traded past the Rock, but it was the Phoenicians who dominated these western waters for over five centuries and, through the colonies they planted, for another three after their own decline. They were the Canaanites of the Bible, who occupied the coastal strip of Palestine north of Carmel—the land allotted to the tribes of Asher and Zebulon at the Exodus, though the Jews were unable to turn the Canaanites out. They were a Semitic people as old as the Jews and closely linked with them by many ties. The Hiram of the quote from I Kings was king of Phoenicia and a close friend of David and Solomon. When, after the death of Solomon, the ten northern Jewish tribes broke off to form the Kingdom of Israel in 975 B.C., Phoenician friendship with the southern kingdom of Judah cooled but with Israel increased; for the people of the north, largely renouncing the Jewish God, took to sharing the worship of the Phoenician gods—Baal, Adon, Moloch, and the chief ones, Melkart and Astarte; and in many other ways began to blend with the Phoenicians.

  The ancient world held the Phoenicians in awe for their industry and intelligence—they invented the alphabet—and at the same time in aversion for their custom of burning small children as sacrifices to Moloch. Their temples enjoyed the services of religious prostitutes of both sexes, but this was not uncommon in other religions.

  They are remembered now not for their vices or virtues but for their skill as sailors and merchants. Their own capitals were Tyre and Sidon, but in 1100 B.C. they founded Gadir (Cadiz) and in 814 B.C. Carthage (near modern Tunis on the North African coast). They had already founded a town on Gibraltar Bay....

  Or had they? There are doubts.

  North and west from the Rock around the head of the bay, a river empties itself into the sea. Often, and appropriately called First River, its true name is Guadarranque. On the left bank there are the ruins of an ancient town. Everyone agrees that the town was called Carteia; the doubt is, when was it founded? Some modern scholars tend to believe there was no town here before Roman times or perhaps only an Iberian village; but the Greeks had a word for it—Heraclea; and if the river and beach were properly shaped for a port, as everyone agrees they were, it is a perfect site, with better natural shelter than any other in southern Spain (except Gadir). On balance it seems probable that Carteia was founded by the Phoenicians in 940 B.C. to exploit the tunny fishing and the beds of murex. The murex is a shellfish from which was extracted the famous "Tyrian purple," the color which later became the fiercely guarded prerogative of Roman nobles and emperors. It was never in fact a true purple but something between rose and dark violet. The dye was made by extracting the shellfish and dropping them into large vats or tanks, often of stone. When they rotted they secreted a yellow liquid, which was the dye. The vats were always placed downwind for obvious reasons.

  The colony's full name was Melkarteia, after the god, but that soon became abbreviated. A thousand years before Christ, therefore, the Rock looked down upon, and was surely regarded as the sacred mountain of, its first real town.

  These are all facts, as best they can be traced through the deceptive and ever-shifting curtains of the years. The ancients, with ancestral memories sharpened by tens of thousands of years when all knowledge, experience, and wisdom had to be passed on by word of mouth, recorded them differently. They did not have modern tools of discovery and analysis and, having been actors rather than spectators, were more interested in transmitting emotion than fact. History was recorded and handed down in myth and fable. One such is the story of the opening of the Strait of Gibraltar. Although it is inconceivable that thinking man could have been present on Earth when it actually happened (at least 30,000,000 years ago), yet the most ancient voices of the past seemed to find it necessary to explain that it had happened within human ken. The act is attributed to a god or demigod, in the Greek version called Herakles and in the Latin Hercules; and this figure was probably the same as Tubal. Hercules tore the mountains apart and set up pillars inscribed Non Plus Ultra (Nothing Beyond) to mark the end of the earth. From the very beginning all men knew that the Pillars of Hercules were the mountains called Abyla on the African shore and, on the European side, the limestone block which the Phoenicians called Alube and the Greeks Calpe, meaning "urn, hollowed out." This was the Rock, Gibraltar, and it was called "hollowed out" because of its innumerable caves, especially one very large one high on the west face, the Great Cave.

  About 1100 B.C. one or several Greek poets called Homer began to compose the Iliad and the Odyssey, which are, in fact, history and geography books, respectively. In them the bards set out in metrical form (so that it could more easily be memorized) all that was known of their own past and of the outside world.

  In the Odyssey Homer's archetypal wanderer, Ulysses or Odysseus, passes through a narrow strait. Here is the relevant passage in the lucid translation of S. O. Andrew:

  Of the two other rocks, the one reaches up to the sky

  With sharp-pointed peak, and a cloud encompasses it

  That never disperses, nor clear air ever reveals

  Even in summer or autumn its heav'n-soaring crest.

  No mortal that perilous summit could scale or descend

  Though with twenty hands and with twenty feet he were born,

  For its surface is smooth, like polished marble, and sheer.

  Midmost the rock is a cavern, misty and dim,

  Turn'd toward the region of darkness where

  Erebus lies, And beneath it,

  O noble Odysseus, your bark ye must steer.

  Not even an archer of power with a shaft from his bow

  Could shoot from a hollow ship to the depth of that cave;

  Therein has yelping Scylla her secret abode,

  Her voice like a newborn whelp's, no greater, yet she

  Is an evil monster indeed, nor would any that pass'd

  Rejoice to behold her, not though an Immortal he were.

  She has twelve feet, which she dangles down in the air,

  And above, six necks, very long, and on each of the six

  A hideous head which is arm'd with a triple array

  Of teeth set thickly teeming with black-venom'd death.

  And nine lines later:

  But mark thou, Odysseus, that other rock which is low,

  Quite nectr to the first (thou coulds't shoot with an arrow across).

  And on it, in full leafage a fig tree there is,

  Where under the mighty Charybdis sucks down the tide.

  Thrice in the day she disgorges and thrice in the day

  She sucks it again; mayest thou never be near when she sucks....

  These passages have sometimes been taken to refer to the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the Italian mainland, but the description fits the Strait of Gibraltar much more closely. Gibraltar was also very far off, and its links with the fabulous Hercules and the hardly less mysterious Tarshish would make it a more attractive location for marvels. The cloud hiding the Rock's head is the most telling evidence, for the levanter cloud is unique in the Mediterranean; and in this poetic version of returned seamen's tall tales one can easily trace the Great Cave, the sheer eastern and northern cliffs, the giant squid with its black ink "venom," and the dangerous race which forms off the point of Septa on the African shore. The only factors against this identification are that the African pillar (Charybdis) is in fact not lower than Gibraltar but considerably higher, and the distance between the two is a good deal more than a bowshot; but the dramatic isolation of the Rock so dominates the strait that several later travelers fell into the first error, and the bowshot distance is
a liberty required by Homer's plot.

  To return to the harsher yet still breathtaking light of history. This is Gibraltar about 600 B.C.... The trees grow thick on the lesser slopes, and sailors often go ashore but do not tarry unless they mean to worship at a shrine of Hercules, for the demigod inhabits the place and is not mocked. Above all, none but the very devout, or the very blasphemous, enter the Great Cave, though it is known to the whole civilized world—it goes into the womb of earth; it holds armies and is not filled; it is dark, but a torch held high shows pillars and walls and steps wrought and decorated and colored beyond the power of mortals to describe....

  The small town by the First River flourishes. The colonists have increasingly close relations with the hinterland, where the Iberians are being diluted by successive waves of another people from the Syrio-Turanian region—the Celts—to form the Celtiberians (this particular influx goes on, in dribs and drabs, for about 800 years, for Julius Caesar records some 6,000 Celts, with women and children, entering Spain in 49 B.C.).

  In the basin of the Mediterranean the peoples, having developed and spread, begin to fight for empire. Phoenicia is attacked by the Assyrian Shalmaneser V in 721 B.C. and much weakened:

  The burden of Tyre. Howl, ye ships of Tarshish; for it is

  laid waste, so that there is no house, no entering in.

  ... —Isaiah 23:1

  Carthage breaks free of the mother country, as colonies will, and from now on it is Carthage, not Tyre, which controls the Phoenician settlements in the west.

  The Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar besieges Tyre in 587 B.C. The following year he destroys Jerusalem, sacks the First Temple, and takes some of its people captive. From both the Assyrian and Babylonian invasions many inhabitants of Phoenicia and neighboring countries, including Judea, escape for refuge to Gadir, Carthage, Sexi (modem Almunecar), Carteia, and a dozen other settlements at the far end of the Mediterranean.

  It is nearly 3,000 years since Mediterranean man first deliberately sailed past the Rock to trade with the wider world his restless explorations kept uncovering. These explorations have kept to the coasts, north and south.

  The kings ... of the isles shall bring presents.... Britain, the Tin Islands, he has known for a thousand years. But in the evenings, faces lit by the flaring lamps, the bards tell of other islands, other continents ... the Isles of the Blest, the Hesperides, Atlantis. Is the Rock, then, a pillar to mark the limit of this world? Or the hinge of the gate which will open to another?

  THE TALISMAN

  The man Pendril stood in the prow of the galley, steadying himself with one hand on the buttocks of the carved figurehead. He was square-built and strong, as though rough-hewn from a hard reddish wood, with curly red hair and deep blue eyes. He did not seem to note the heave and shudder of the vessel under his feet, nor to feel the spray dashing regularly onto his cheeks, nor to hear the rhythmic grunt of the rowmaster's chant to the rowers. The gray mountain in the sea loomed close now. For the past hour its cliffs had cut off the westerly sun. Pendril stared at it somberly, like a man watching a woman whom he has never possessed but dreams of above all. He knew every cleft and crag of those cliffs, every stone and bush and flower. The wind began to slacken, cut off by the sea mountain. The man stared on.

  The girl Tamar stood in the stem, holding with one hand to the gunwale beside her. The wind molded her cotton dress against her thighs and breasts and whipped tendrils of her black hair about her ears. Beside her, two bare-chested sailors held the steering oar, their feet braced strongly against slats set in the deck.

  The girl's husband, Daniel, came up from their cabin and stretched and yawned. He looked over the side and called, "Pendril, it is calmer. We can round the point after all."

  The man in the bow did not seem to hear, and Daniel repeated his remark louder. Pendril turned then and came aft, rolling easily with the motion of the galley. "It is only calm here because we are in the lee of Alube," he said. He spoke a strangely accented Phoenician which Tamar found harsh and unpleasing.

  "I disagree," Daniel said. "It is calm. Keep them rowing."

  Tamar nodded approvingly. The new boatswain was a rude man, experienced, of course, but uneducated. Daniel was too gentle with him. Such men as he only understood force.

  The boatswain said, "Look, you can see the waves off the point from here. That's a dangerous race in this wind." Daniel stamped his foot. "I am the owner and the captain! We will not anchor. We will round the point and go into Carteia!"

  Tamar caught the boatswain's blue eyes glancing at her under raised eyebrows and scowled fiercely at him.

  Pendril said, "You are the captain, but you are not the god Melkart. The rowers are exhausted. The race prevents the oars' getting a good bite. We will not get around the point, however long we try."

  "Go farther out into the strait," Daniel said. "There is no race there."

  "No," Pendril answered. "But the current against us is over a knot faster than we can row."

  "Oh, anchor then," Daniel cried and strode up to the bow and stood there with arms folded.

  Pendril shouted below, "Stand by to anchor." The rowmaster stuck his head through the hatch, where he could hear the deck commands and bob down to give the necessary orders to the rowers below. One sailor stayed at the steering oar; the other five went to the bows, thrusting Daniel out of the way with little ceremony. He came aft, and Tamar went to him.

  "The gods have turned the wind against us," he said gloomily.

  "Or perhaps it is Pendril who makes us go so slowly. I wish you had not hired him."

  Her husband shrugged. She knew he had had no choice, for the real boatswain had deserted at the last port, Sexi. It had been a stroke of good fortune to find a qualified man ready and willing to take the long journey to the Tin Islands, and without one they could not go, for Daniel had never sailed beyond Gadir.

  "Come," she said. "The cook is making a savory smell." He brightened and rubbed his hands together gleefully, for his moods were never deep or long held but like a child's.

  She slept badly that night, partly because the motion of the ship was different from when it lay in harbor, partly because dreams disturbed her. She had hoped, after supper, that Daniel would take her as a man had a right to take his wife, though he so seldom did. She had yearned toward him, caressed him while they ate, pressed her body against him when they lay down, sent him messages of love and desire from her eyes. But he did not respond, only slept.

  Sleep did not come to her for two hours, and when it did, images of lust filled it. Unknown men held her, and she welcomed them one after another. Daniel shook her at last where she lay beside him on the wolf skins and said she would awaken the whole ship, she was making so much noise. But though she tried to soothe the trembling void of her womanhood, she could not sleep again.

  In the morning the wind still blew strong from the west, and broken white water extended far out from the point of the Rock. She was pacing the deck by dawn, tired but unable to rest, biting her nails, patting her hair, looking at the sailors asleep by the mast. Daniel came up, followed by Pendril.

  "This wind will hold all day," Pendril said.

  "We shall stay here till tomorrow then," Daniel said at once, as though to forestall the boatswain's suggesting the same thing.

  "Aye, captain," Pendril said. "Then I shall go ashore to Carteia. It is Midsummer's Eve, our most important feast day."

  "Very well," Daniel said.

  "I shall be back before dawn tomorrow. It would be safe to let half the sailors and rowers ashore, too. They will..."

  "No," Daniel snapped and turned his back.

  "I want to go, too," Tamar said suddenly, astonished to hear herself saying the words. "Take me to Carteia, Daniel. There must be an inn where we can stay."

  "But, Tamar, we will be there tomorrow... her husband said.

  "I want to go today, now," she cried. "I am tired of being caged in this ship. I want to see the feast!"

  Daniel said,
"I am tired, wife. In truth, I do not feel well.... Would you go with Pendril, if you must go? She can stay with your family, I suppose?"

  Pendril said, "I have no family. There is the inn." He launched the little horse-prowed dinghy over the side. Tamar hesitated, frowning. Pendril and a sailor dropped lightly into the dinghy. He called up roughly, "If you are coming, come."

  "Wait," she commanded and rushed to her cabin. Quickly she tidied her hair, put it up with her silver pins and comb, donned her best robe, fastened the neck with a little bronze scarab brooch, and made up her eyes with antimony.

  Pendril waited, tossing alongside in the little hippos. She was a spoiled Judean brat but pretty in a wild way and brave. Not many rich women would be going to the Tin Islands when they might be entertaining lovers in comfort at home.

  She came on deck, and his eyes widened. She looked like an Egyptian whore now ... albeit a beautiful one. That husband of hers was a pleasant fellow but not built for the sea: or for women perhaps.

  A sailor helped her into the hippos. "Careful now,"

  Pendril growled, "Kneel. I cannot save you if you go over."

  "There would be no need," she snapped. "I can swim."

  "Enjoy yourself," Daniel called from the deck, as the sailor started paddling the hippos toward the cliffs. In a few moments they reached the small waves in the shallows. Pendril swung himself overboard and held out his arms. She ignored him, lifted her robe above her knees, stepped over the side, and waded ashore. The sailor paddled back to the Kedesha.

  Ahead, a great cave opened at the foot of the cliff, a steep slope of sand and earth leading up into it. Pendril started up into the cave, and Tamar followed, wondering. Deep in under the overhang of the arch she found Pendril on his knees, digging with his hands in the powdery earth. He did not turn round or speak.

  "What are you looking for?" she asked at last.

  He did not answer, and she began to turn the dark powdery earth over with her foot, not knowing what she might find. Sailors had been sheltering in this cave for a long time.