The Pillars of Hercules

The young ragged man and his apprentices fascinated me, and seemed to represent an entirely new kind of penetration in the Mediterranean, a region which had known so many immigrants over thousands of years. It was a poor town on an island that was so poor the local people left it to find work. But it was also a town which had never before seen Africans.

There were some more Africans at the railway station. I asked them the question I had meant to ask Omar. Why not get a job?

“There is no work. We would work in a factory if we could find one. But there are no factories.”

“So what’s your plan?”

“No plan. Stay here.”

Heading south, I took the train to a town in the north-central part of the island, Chilivani, a railway junction. Out of Olbia, the rocky sheep-nibbled hinterland of scrubby trees and low hills were all tumbled together and blown by the wind, like the Scottish lowlands. There were rocky peaks in the distance where, in the manner of Corsicans, the Nuraghic people of Sardinia had traditionally made their homes, away from the coasts, and fought off the numerous invaders. Beyond Chilivani, the people in the mountainous region of Barbagia (“extreme examples of the Sardinian national character”) had never acknowledged any rule over them and had never paid taxes. The Romans had failed to make them citizens (which was why they called these people Barbagians—barbarians). Sardinia had been annexed but so little did it figure in Rome’s plans that it was used as a place to which Jews were deported under the rule of Tiberias (A.D. 14–37). More recently, the Italians had no more luck than the Romans in bringing Sardinians under control, even with enormous numbers of policemen sent from the mainland to pacify the remote districts. Still, rural crime—murder, sheep-stealing, extortion—were unusually high in Sardinia. The Barbagians had been Barbagians for two thousand years.

There were stone walls everywhere along the line, and as far as I could see, every mile of landscape demarcated. I was in a two-coach train filled with yelling youngsters on their way home from school. They were going fifteen or twenty miles away, and though they were very loud, and even rowdy, cackling in their incomprehensible dialect, when a woman straightened up and said, “Excuse me, but would you please close that window?” two of them instantly obeyed.

It was a bleak untidy beauty in a sparsely populated island. We were among vineyards, running past a range of granite peaks. There were sheep grazing inside the walls in the foreground and in some places cork trees, like those in Corsica, stripped of their bark.

The noisiest youngsters got off at a country station called Berchidda, where there was a small settlement, and others at Oschiri, which had the look of a penal colony. Many Sardinian towns looked like that, and others looked ancient, and some had the prefabricated look of having been thrown up last week.

Chilivani was no more than an intersection of two railway lines, in a strong wind. I sat for a while and eventually connected with a train that was coming from Sassari, a bigger faster train that sped past a continuous landscape of walled-off pastures, all over the hillsides, under a large sky of tumbling woolly clouds that somewhat resembled the unshorn sheep in these pastures.

We were less than twenty miles from the western coast, but so little connection was there between these sheep farms and the coast we might have been a thousand miles from the sea. That was a Mediterranean feature. Life was different away from the shore. Five or ten miles inland from anywhere in the Mediterranean and you were in a separate world.

Much of what I saw was solid rock, long slopes of veined and wrinkled stone, and meadows of stone too, the whole place like an ancient lava flow, except that this was not fertile and volcanic but ironlike crusts of granite. Some of the smooth stone slopes also were partitioned with bouldery walls. I had never seen such a landscape before, nor had I ever imagined it except on a distant planet.

At the town of Bonorva all the newer houses were made of gray cinder blocks. Out of town was a vast stony landscape of tussocky grass and dark twisted trees, the big sky full of smoky clouds. I made a note, the landscape looks abused, and only later discovered that many mining companies, foreign as well as Italian, had come and ransacked it for minerals, for antimony, coal, lead, silver and zinc.

Farther south the sight of a mustached man in the middle of nowhere, leading sheep down a path from one field to another. A shepherd—the first of many I saw. Shepherding was as old an occupation in the Mediterranean as fishing, and this man with his flat cap and his crook and his dog represented to me a timelessness that was both melancholy and indestructible.

Around four, I looked at my map, saw that we were near the town of Oristano, and decided to get off here and spend a night and a day, what the hell.