Annals of the Former World

by John McPhee

  In 2760 B.C., smelting began in Cyprus, Constantinou told us. And in the following centuries Cyprus became an island of seven kingdoms. Slag heaps developed in forty places. The Iliad is populated with warriors armed in bronze. Bronze is copper hardened by adding some tin, and the copper would have come from Cyprus. (Copper was mined on Cyprus for nearly two thousand years before the lifetime of Homer.) In 490 B.C., Darius the Persian attacked Greece with forty thousand soldiers who carried bronze shields and bronze javelins. The Phoenicians also mined copper on Cyprus, the Romans as well. The ancients stripped the supergene, and other rich ores, down to the water table, where they had to stop. The Republic of Cyprus once used ancient slag for roads, but the old slag heaps are now protected as monuments.

  After the mine at Sha, we drove on ancient slag through roadcuts of pillow basalt, west-northwest. There were orchards of carobs, figs, and pistachios, and an understory of prickly pears. This was not Lawrence Durrell’s north-coastal range of “silk, almonds, apricots, oranges, pomegranates, quince.” It was an interior country of buff eucalyptus, of thousand-year-old olive trees fluted at the base. Nearly every farmhouse was white, and most had sky-blue shutters—the colors not of Cyprus but of Greece. On virtually all rooftops were boxy solar water heaters, like raised sarcophagi. With few exceptions, they carried advertising.

  On the Mesaoria, we passed new, isolated towns—one—story clusters of temporary housing, marginally superior to internment camps, built to shelter Greek Cypriot refugees from communities north of the Attila Line. We left the highway and went into the new and extremely narrow streets of Peristerona, which seemed less a town than a military barracks. Many of its people were natives of Katokopia, scarcely three miles away, but Katokopia was lost to them, beyond the Turkish line. Among these was Anastasia Constantinou, the mother of the director of the Geological Survey. She was elderly, tall, dressed in black, obviously pleased to see her son no matter what he might bring with him. The hour was near noon, the air somewhat humid and above a hundred degrees. There was a small greenhouse full of gardenias, camellias, and azaleas. The geologist went among them with a mist propagator. He opened folding chairs on a concrete terrace with a view across the treeless plain to the marble mountains of Kyrenia—the dark wall of the forbidden north. His mother set on a table bowls of boiled rice flour that had lightly thickened as it cooled. Sprinkled with sugar, it was very cold, standing in rose water. In that volcanic heat, it had four times the effect of a cold fruit soup, twice the effect of gazpacho. If you closed your eyes, you saw pools among gardens descending into pools.

  At Skouriotissa, southwest of Peristerona, the concurrence of geologic time and human time had been long enough to approach a record. A very large working strip mine there had been in operation for four thousand three hundred years. The slag, piled in pyramids, represented all that time. Constantinou said that there were at least two million tons of ancient slag in and around Skouriotissa. “Skouria” means slag. The massive copper-bearing sulphide ores of Cyprus have a very characteristic sugary structure, he said, resulting in an incompetent rock that was always easy to mine. “The ancients were excellent geologists. They knew the geology of the ore bodies of Cyprus. I am an exploration geologist with a Ph.D. I don’t think we will find any ore body the ancients did not know about.”

  The earliest known smelting of copper was in China. Did the Cypriots figure it out for themselves or learn how to do it from others? In ancient manuscripts, Constantinou said, there is no insight that helps to answer that question. Where you find copper, you will find iron. The umber of Cyprus is more than half iron. “It seems logical to expect that Cypriot umber was the world’s first iron source, that iron was invented on Cyprus. The ancients used gabbro to grind the ore. They lined their furnaces with serpentine.”

  They fired their furnaces with Aleppo pines, and other conifers—the ancient forests of Cyprus. To smelt one pound of copper from sulphide required three hundred pounds of charcoal. From the earliest beginnings of the mining until the last years of the Roman Empire, about two hundred thousand tons of copper were smelted on Cyprus. That used up fifty-eight thousand square miles of pinewood forest, on an island whose total area is thirty-six hundred square miles. The forest had to be rejuvenated sixteen times for copper alone, not to mention the fleets of ships that were made on Cyprus, or the firing of the island’s world-renowned kilns.

  “For lack of wood, Oman, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Israel all had short-lived mines,” Constantinou said. “The Troodos gave water here to support trees. But sixty million tons of charcoal made from 1.2 billion cubic metres of wood is no joke. Sometimes I close my eyes and see that ancient scene. I get crazy. I see all those people, tens of thousands of people, carrying ore, carrying wood.”

  Before Moores went back to California and I to Switzerland, I accompanied him on a brief reconnaissance in Macedonia. While Cyprus was surely, as he had described it, one of the best-developed ophiolite complexes in the world, the sequence there did not include a large percentage of mantle rock. In a typical slice of ocean lithosphere, the mantle rock is nearly twenty per cent, bottoming at the asthenosphere, the lubricious zone in the mantle which allows plates to glide. In Cyprus, the serpentinized mantle rock of the Troodos was a relatively small part of the peridotite that had once been included in the package. The rest was buried or lost. If you wanted to sense what was missing, you could do so in Macedonia, where seven vertical kilometres of exposed mantle constitute one of the thickest measurable sections of mantle rock emplaced on any continent. Moores said, “Presumably, it goes to the bottom of the plate.”

  In the disjunct cacophony of the airport in Athens—through a sea of Arabs wearing kaffiyehs and tobes and running shoes, of Ethiopians with wallets the size of magazines, of Panasonic briefcases turned up full—we found Hertz. We were soon at the foot of the Acropolis, establishing our bearings. Moores told me to notice the red shales and red cherts around the Theatre of Dionysus, on the low ground, and—over his shoulder as he rapidly climbed—to watch for the contact where the lithology changes. It would have been hard to miss. The freestanding, high-standing Acropolis is an almost pure massive limestone, sitting on the cherts and shales. Our way was blocked by a ticket booth. We paid a hundred drachmas. American college students were all over the summit. In the frugal shade of the Parthenon, Moores had the look and certainly the sound of a free-lance English-speaking guide. He mentioned Ictinus, Callicrates. American students leaned in to listen. He lauded the durable Phidias. He moved to the south side of the building, and students followed. He mentioned that limestone is soluble in water. Therefore, it includes caves. In caves within this hill, gods were thought to reside. Grottoed limestone will impound water. If you were seeking refuge, or a place to endure a siege, you would choose a hill like this one. We were looking south over the Stoa of Eumenes to the shore of the Saronic Gulf. From runways there, 747s were rising. They seemed in no hurry to go away. They seemed to hang like barrage balloons. Moores said, “After the battle of Salamis, ships beached themselves by the airport. As caves in limestone enlarge, their roofs eventually collapse.”

  He mentioned the Parthenon’s historical stratigraphy—temple, church, mosque—and the erosional forces that had brought the building to its present condition: rain, acid rain, smog, gunpowder. In 1687, the Parthenon was in use as a Turkish powder magazine. Venetians bombarded it, and the powder exploded. The event was geomorphologically catastrophic. For two thousand years the Parthenon had stood there uneroded, until that night in 1687. “There is no mortar in the Parthenon,” Moores added pensively. “It is all marble, and held together by gravity. And it’s gone through earthquakes, too. The geology is not well worked out here. The general story is that the Acropolis is a klippe, resting on the red cherts and shales. It is not a deep block.”

  A klippe is a remnant of a nappe. A nappe is a large body of rock that has been moved—by gravity, by thrust-faulting, or by any other mechanism—some distance from its p
lace of origin. If you liked, you could call Cyprus a special kind of nappe. Moores gestured to the east, across the white city and its numerous hills, to the serrated profile of the Hymettus Range, less than ten miles away. “It is thought that the Acropolis came from there,” he said. “There are problems with the idea, but it is distinctly possible.”

  In the heat and pressure of a collision or some other tectonic event, limestone softens, recrystallizes, and hardens as marble. The Hymettus Range is for the most part marble. Its limestone first collected on the floor of Tethys, and was later folded in collisional mountains compressed by Africa moving northeast. Marble quarries in the range had been there for something like three thousand years. The Parthenon came out of a quarry at the foot of Mt. Hymettus.

  If the Acropolis is a klippe, the Acropolis itself came away from the Hymettus Range, in Eocene time, and travelled overland to Athens. About fifty million years later, in late Holocene time, the Parthenon followed, in carts.

  “An alternative possibility,” Moores said, “is that the Acropolis is a large block in a melange with a matrix of red cherts and shales—an accretionary wedge tectonically scraped from Tethys when the seafloor was subducting in the Mesozoic.”

  The American students were looking at one another, and Moores was becoming self-conscious. A guide he may have been, but the language he was speaking was, to the students, local. “I have always thought it sacrilegious to come here and do geology,” he said. The tone was apologetic but not sincere. His next words were “I think the shales would correlate with the Olonos-Pindos deepwater sediments, which extend from the Peloponnesus through western Greece.”

  As one might expect in a marine country sitting on a microplate caught in the crunch between Africa and Europe, ophiolitic fragments of varying age are strewn about Greece like amphora handles. As Moores drove up the broad avenue of Vasillisis Sofias and into Sintagma Square, he remarked that the silver that financed Athens came out of a metamorphosed ophiolite at Laurium, near Cape Sounion, the southern tip of Attica. He parked beside the Bank of Greece. Standing at a teller’s cage on a green-and-black floor of polished serpentine, he changed dollars to drachmas.

  North through Attica we moved swiftly, as if we were in a light plane flying at an altitude of three feet. A few miles west of the North Euboean Gulf, Moores pulled over and stopped at what appeared to be a long high roadcut. It was actually a limestone cliff, of the Parnassus Range, which rose steeply behind it. “There are bits and pieces of ophiolite on top of the Parnassus,” Moores said. “This is Thermopylae.” The broad coastal plain to the east was full of olives and cotton and was large enough to accommodate a very large army. In 480 B.C., however, the coastal plain was not there, and water lapped close to the rock. There was insufficient room for the attacking Persian Army. Leonidas, king of the Spartans, defended the narrow margin of land with Parnassus ridges at his back. He was defeated after the Persians learned of a route around the ridges. “Hot springs were at the foot of the mountains then,” Moores said. “They are long gone. The coastal plain came up recently—at some point in the past twenty-five hundred years—as a result of an earthquake.”

  In the nineteen-sixties, in his long and lonely field seasons in Macedonia, Moores read his way in several senses into the country. He learned to speak the language. His interests were well spread across a couple of hundred million years. He asked me if I knew John Cuthbert Lawson’s Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Religion, and described it as “polytheistic mysticism with a superficial patina of Christianity.” Not being a geologist, I took his word for it. Farther north, he said:

  —This is Lamia. A few kilometres outside Lamia, during the Second World War, Greek partisans shot three German soldiers. Germans stopped the first hundred and thirty-eight people who came down the road, and killed them. The German rule was fifty Greeks for one German.

  —Over there to the east, fifteen miles, is Volos, where Jason and the Argonauts sailed from.

  —Pharsala is about twenty-five miles west of us. Near Pharsala, Caesar defeated Pompey on alluvium at the western margin of the Tsangli ophiolite. Pharsala itself is on serpentine. If you see a black church, you are probably looking at serpentine. That’s particularly so in Italy. In Florence, the dark rock in the walls of the Duomo is serpentine—and the Giotto campanile and the baptistery with the Ghiberti doors. In Istanbul, the dark columns in the Hagia Sophia are serpentine.

  We came into a vast horizon of land so flat it seemed unnatural. It seemed flatter than the Great Central Valley of California, if that is possible. Solitary oaks were widely spaced above cotton, wheat, barley—a tree on each twenty acres, more or less. In a manner that called up ritual, tall telephone poles stalked across the two-dimensional landscape. Woodhenge. A huge Pleistocene lake had been here. In the stillness of its depths, smooth silts collected:

  —This is the Plain of Thessaly. In the eighth century B.C., Greek tribes settled here, chasing off the inhabitants. The fugitives went into the hills. They were fine horsemen. They raided the Greek settlements on horseback. The legend of the centaurs may have come from this. At night, you couldn’t tell man from horse.

  —Do you see those switchbacks climbing out of the plain? The Greeks used to survey a road by putting a hundred kilos on the back of a burro and sending him uphill. They followed the burro with a road.

  Three coastal mountains now formed the eastern skyline: Mt. Pelion, Mt. Ossa, and Mt. Olympus. In an island universe of Mt. Olympuses, there is one Mt. Olympus. This one. Sealed in its own integument, at the moment it was eighty per cent cloud. We could see only the base. Of the country more immediately around us, Moores said:

  —This is the Pelagonian Massif, a Mesozoic microcontinent that was thrust over a dome of younger sediment. The dome is marine rock—shallow-water limestone and flysch. From the highest part of the dome, the Pelagonian rock has worn away, and in that window stands Mt. Olympus, ten thousand six hundred feet. I think you need technical equipment to get to the summit.

  —This is the Vale of Tempe, where the Muses came down off Olympus and played in the waters.

  We were soon in highland Macedonia, with wide views over red-and-white villages to far-distant mountains: west into the Pindus Range, north into Albania. At five thousand feet, the modest summits of Macedonia—Vourinos, Flambouron—were about as high as the Adirondacks of northern New York. Vourinos and Flambouron and the country roundabout had risen a great deal more than that. Somehow they had been lifted forty-five thousand vertical feet, and were almost pure mantle.

  The Vourinos Complex—this mantle peridotite included—was Tethyan seafloor that formed in a spreading center in Jurassic time. It was emplaced on the Pelagonian microcontinent in lower Cretaceous time, and later broken into four major fault blocks. The narrative was straightforward and fairly simple, but of course it had not been helpful to Moores as he began work here in 1963, because plate tectonics and emplaced ophiolites were uncoined terms and the narrative did not exist. He was further inconvenienced by the ravages and deceptions of erosion, which had caused the lowest rock in the sequence to stand highest in the country. Moreover, the sheeted dikes of Vourinos diabase were misleadingly parallel to the sedimentary beds that had formed above them. After years of living with this terrane and taking it apart in his mind, Moores had come to realize that soon after the dikes formed at a spreading center they had been rotated ninety degrees from their original plane. In recent time, the four fault blocks had tilted over as well, and were like broken segments of a fallen ancient column. On paper, Moores had brought them into spatial coherence. He had worked here intensively for three years, and continually after that. He had recognized the contrast between the mantle rock and the magmatic rocks above it, and had become convinced that these parts taken together were in turn parts of a larger sequence.

  Now, on the road to Skoumtsa, in the valley of a small clear stream, he was standing on the contact between the ophiolite and the Pelagonian rock on which it had been e
mplaced. Pelagonian limestone was overlain by serpentine that had been sheared up badly and turned into a messy schist as it skidded to a tectonic stop. The mantle peridotite had been serpentinized there where it scraped upon the continent, but as we moved away from that boundary the peridotite became purer to the point of zero serpentinization. The rock had never been magma. We were seeing (he presumed) the earth’s mantle in an essentially unaltered state.

  Since the ophiolitic column was lying on its side, we could advance overland on the face of the earth and lithologically descend deeper and deeper into the mantle. We did this on a very rocky and narrow road, some of which had been cut by engineering. After crossing the stream, we paused to look at a dynamited outcrop—a rough texture, dark green, knobby with pyroxene in a smooth matrix of olivine. “This is solid mantle,” he said. “It’s just about as fresh as you’ll ever find, with the exception of mantle material in a diamond pipe. We are roughly five kilometres below the petrologic Moho, and that would have been about ten kilometres below the Tethyan ocean bottom, and fifteen kilometres below Tethyan sea level. Some people like to think that this rock slid by gravity into its position on the Pelagonian continental platform. From fifteen kilometres below sea level? How do you do that with a gravity slide?”