The wisest men tell us that everything, sooner or later, changes. And all change commences with a specific moment. We say to ourselves, “I won’t do this again, I must become different.” And we succeed—eventually.
One day, even the mighty ice changed—it started to shrink and retreat. One single day, ten and a half thousand years ago, Ireland’s climate began to alter. The chilling gale that came with the ice blew itself out. Softer breezes floated in from the west. Gentle and warm sea currents came from the southwest. A hot African wind rode up past the coast of Spain and caressed our southern shores.
Gradually these warm forces loosened the ice’s awful grip. Its edges frayed by an inch at a time—and then by a yard—and then by a mile. Soon, like the pink-brown skin in the healing of a wound, the native earth of Ireland began to appear again.
I’ve described to you how the ice had ripped into the terrain on its advance. Well, it did so too on its retreat. Large melting slabs of ice gouged out caves and fjords and chasms. The ancient stone foundations of our land shook, undermined by the desperate, slipping ice. Rocky glens opened again as their walls crumbled. The clay began to breathe. Hills and mountains shone in the new sun, and down their slopes poured ribbons of new, silver waters. When you gaze at a mountain from a distance, and you see a shining river that looks like the spoor of a snail, you can be sure that was an Ice Age stream.
That final loosening sent boulders sliding down mountainsides and hurled stones down into valleys, as the ice ripped them away from their rock bodies. These “glacial erratics,” as they’re called, loiter to this day across the Irish landscape, some of them big as houses. I myself have been glad of their shelter many times. And they lie at the core of the story of Newgrange.
As though to collect breath, the Storyteller halted. Puffs of steam rose from his wet boots as they dried in the heat of the fire.
In the pause, people stirred. The boy looked anxiously at his mother to check her mood—and she seemed calm. His father took off his spectacles and polished them with a little amber cloth. Without his glasses, his sky-blue eyes sparkled.
The boy pushed down his stockings and rubbed his shins, now hot and mottled from the fire. Nobody moved from where they sat; one or two of the men had taken off their jackets and sat shirtsleeved. Their faces glowed, with pride as much as heat; this epic account gave them the story of their own ancestry, the origins and magnificence of their own country. The women seemed more placid, less intense in their enjoyment—but nonetheless enthralled. Nobody reflected the magic of the hour as much as the children, whose faces glowed like lamps.
As the Storyteller gathered strength for the next installment, he curled one hand around the bowl of his pipe and raised the forefinger of the other hand commandingly. He drew three, four, five, silent puffs on the pipe and took it from his mouth.
THIS PLACE, NEWGRANGE—HOW MUCH DO you know about it? You might have read in the newspapers of this great and mysterious edifice under the ground in county Meath. It’s not far in from the coast, and it’s northwest of Dublin by about thirty miles or so. I’ve been there myself, and it’s a mighty place, in rich land on a hill above the river Boyne. The local people know all about it because over the centuries many gentlemen and scholars have examined it, guessing at its history and building a good body of lore. A kind woman who lives on the hillside took me into what she called “our cave.” She lit a stub of a candle, and the flame was enough to display great wonders to me.
This marvelous, immortal structure was built five thousand years ago, before Stonehenge in England, before the pyramids of Egypt. Every person in the world should visit it, because it tells us how amazing were the ancestors of man. It’s a very inspiring place, and while I was there, I came to consider a great deal about it and the person who built it—and this story entered my mind.
The Architect of Newgrange was a young man, possessed of a tall and thin physique, above which his wild head of tawny hair looked like a tree on fire. His deep-set eyes frightened the children, and his manner took no account of courtesy—which is to say that he treated people abruptly. Until the events occurred that I am about to relate to you, he had spent much of his life in silence, speaking only when spoken to, never offering friendship, and generally avoiding the burden of conviviality. His was the life of the aloof. If we wish to excuse someone for being like that, we say, “Ah, they’re shy,” and I do believe he was a shy child and grew up a shy young man.
At one stage of his life, this remote and strange individual began to invest a deep interest in the observation of stone—and by stone, I mean those rocks I’ve just described to you that were cast down the mountains when the ice melted.
To most people, a stone is a stone—nothing more and nothing less than a rock. But this young man grew to love stone the way farmers love cattle, the way women love children, the way boys love pretty girls, the way the waves love the shore. To him, stone seemed to speak; he didn’t hear a voice, but he understood it just the same, because deep in his mind a picture formed—of the world as it must have been long, long ago, before there were trees with leaves or animals with fur. Stone brought the past to him and brought him to the past.
Now, this man’s people, who commanded the hill of Newgrange—they lived handsomely. Their land of rich, brown clay was left behind ten thousand years ago, a great, wide silt after the ice melted. Like all such terrain in Europe, it was discovered by travelers coming over from the east in search of a fertile living.
In Ireland they found a good and pleasant home. Hazel and rowan trees already covered the plains and grew down the mountainsides and into the valleys. Wide, slow rivers took the voyagers in from the coast on the logs of their simple rafts. And they discovered that if they cleared the trees, they could settle almost anywhere, because the earth was so easy to cultivate.
Hillsides proved the best places. They could live off the fine land and cast an eye over the surrounding countryside for approaching dangers. Newgrange proved ideal—a high hill with good soil overlooking a placid river. People settled there very early, six thousand years before the birth of Christ, and they began to work the earth of the Boyne Valley.
In those far-off days, everyone on such a hillside labored hard. From the age a child could lift or scrabble to the oldest man or woman able to drag or push, they hauled and parted and combed the clay. The soil they tilled was warm and deep and full of different colors—honey or red-gold or mahogany. Scatter seeds there, and something always grew.
And every year they turned the soil, they sowed their seeds, they welcomed the rain, they hailed the sun, and they were happy.
Yet for all their prosperity and for all their good fortune, they made slow progress in life—because they hadn’t yet discovered anything better to work with than stone. They depended upon it for their weapons and tools, and they handled it well. In their hands, stone made stone; using stone tools, they hammered out new stone implements—knives and chisels, copied from shards of stone that they found among the occasional little beaches of shale on the banks of the river.
They also established what you might call local factories. These were places to which they hauled the rocks that they found strewn in the countryside. Hacking into such boulders with stone axes and sledgehammers, they cut javelins, arrows, more hammers, and better stone axes.
Every stone in the world has a cutting point, a place on the stone where the cleanest break may be achieved. The men who made those weapons knew how to find that fault line, how to split a stone as neatly as a slice. As every stonemason has understood since the gods were born, when you add edge to weight, your cutting power doubles. And once they had mastered how to use it, nothing resisted their stone; the skull of a foe, the neck of a beast, the crest of a slope—everything yielded to it.
And that is how our young man with the wild tawny hair and the deep-set eyes first came to such a closeness with stone; he found that he had a gift for using it expertly. He understood economy—how to get strong resu
lts from controlled circumstances. His weapons and tools seemed neater, more efficient, more powerful than anyone else’s because he realized that no dagger need be too long, no axe too heavy—a weapon’s power only springs to life in the hands of its user, and those he made for himself always had perfect balance.
His gift with stone saved the young man’s life once. One day, breaking branches in the trees where the forest had been forced back from the hill of Newgrange, he heard a noise. He looked up and saw a bear glaring at him from the ferns. She probably had cubs nearby—because bears, by and large, tend to leave people alone unless they fear for their young.
He had no intention of troubling this creature, but the bear didn’t know that. The brown fur stood up at her neck; he could see the red-pink of her gums, the white spikes of her teeth, and the rage and terror in her eyes.
On the ground near his feet, his bare toes felt a heavy rock shard, long as a short sword. He stood very still, watching the bear carefully, his feet teasing the shard of stone into position. With a great roar, she rushed toward him. He bent swiftly, snatched up the shard, and drove the stony spike high into the bear’s throat.
The force of his thrust almost broke his hand, but he had enough strength to twist the weapon. He saw blood on the stone, not much, enough to tell him he had wounded the animal. The bear stepped back and collected herself to attack again. But the young man lunged forward, this time roaring wildly. The bear recoiled farther; the young man struck—again and again, until the bear keeled over backward. He jumped on her and hammered the shard into her neck over and over until she was dead.
Now: the people of Newgrange had their own government—Elders and Eldresses who passed the laws and made the decisions that regulated life on the hillside. They addressed all spiritual matters too, such as when, why, and how to make sacrifices to the gods.
One year, as the leaves turned gold, the Elders held a special meeting. The harvest had again been abundant, and as they blessed their fortune they began to discuss, in the warmth of the moment, finding a way to thank their ancestors, honoring their dead. The Chief Elder, his face very serious, said, “We must build something that we will be remembered for. We must build a structure that will not only respect our forefathers but will also preserve the spirit of our people.”
A great meeting was called, to which almost everyone on the hillside came. But the arguments grew so heated that they had to convene again, and again, and again. To and fro the discussion raged—what will constitute an eternal honor, and how is it to be done?
I’ve said that almost everyone on the hillside attended those debates. One voice didn’t speak—our wild young man stayed away. Nobody uttered surprise at his absence, and many expressed relief. They’d always found him a little odd; he didn’t say much to many, but in the previous few years they’d avoided him even further, because they’d begun to fear him. With good reason—one day, he had suddenly and openly killed two men. His status as a warrior may have placed him above punishment, but his deed caused the hillside fear; folk evaded him, didn’t meet his eye, chose not to work alongside him.
What they didn’t know—and he never told them—was the reasons he had killed the two men. The day after the bear’s death, the young man had grown despondent with remorse; he couldn’t endure the fact that when he had killed the bear, he had also orphaned her cubs. So he took off into the forest to bring them back and try to rear them. He never found them. Three, four, five days he searched, checking lairs, taking risks—but no cubs.
When he returned to Newgrange, he came upon a commotion. A bunch of lesser men had found the cubs, had killed one, and were burning the second cub on the spit. The young man raced up the hill and arrived as the squealing cub, two months old, shuddered and died, blood oozing from its eyes, its fur scorched black.
He killed the man who was holding the cub. With an axe lying nearby he split the fellow diagonally from shoulder to hip, and then he pounded a hole in the man’s forehead. The first cub was already being skinned by one of the men—a nice fur cap for the winter. He killed him too, this time not bothering with attacking the body—he just split the man’s head wide open. The bystanders, who, a minute earlier had been laughing at the sport with the bear cubs, scattered like chaff in a wind. But from that moment, everyone avoided the young man.
He made it easy for them. The incident filled him with dreadful feelings, and he took off into the forest again. Thereafter, his taste for lone roving grew larger. He also knew that his rage had been released, and he knew that when that happened, he had no way of reining it in. So whenever he felt angry, he vanished for days or weeks at a time.
While he roamed, he looked at everything he saw in the world and tried to imagine its origins. That was how he came to love stone. Everywhere he went he scrutinized some new boulder or slab, relishing the sight and bulk and feel of it. And who’s to say he didn’t now and then run his tongue over a rock and taste one of life’s joys—a fresh little pool of rainwater in the hollow of a crag immediately after a shower?
Came the day of the last big meeting. No matter what the wild young man’s reputation, regardless of how rough or dangerous or foolish he was generally thought to be, a number of Elders believed in him and began to raise his name as the man for the job. He might seem unsteady at times, they agreed, perhaps a touch mad, and his rages might cause havoc, but the Eldresses perceived in him the potential of a great doer as well as a dreamer. And the Chief Elder believed him the best weapon maker, the most intelligent of the farmers, and something of a visionary—and so he persuaded him to come to the final meeting. This was to be the day of decision.
From early afternoon the people began to assemble in the Long House, the Elders’ parliament building. A great, wide fire lit the darkness of the windowless chamber. Men, women, and children squatted on skins scattered across the mud floor. The Chief Elder spoke first. He announced that, although he wanted to hear further argument, he hoped they would now decide as to how, and with what, and where, they would build this great eternal monument. So far, all they had agreed was that they should use wood.
The wild young man had come in late and stood near the door. He kept his head down, looked at no one. The Chief Elder, who had personally invited him and asked for his views, called him forward; reluctantly he came up to where the Elders stood, coughed to clear his throat, and spoke.
He began by addressing the sacredness of the mighty project. They all claimed, he said, that they wished nothing less than the finest possible memorial. “Our dead,” he said, “will always be with us—therefore we must honor them with something that will always be there. And we can’t say that of wood. Wood doesn’t last.”
Yes, he agreed, wood was beautiful, a child knew that. But wood rotted; a child knew that, too—maggots ate into the wood, and the rain did the rest.
“There’s only one thing that lasts,” he said, “and that is—stone.”
He held out the fingers of one hand and counted. One, stone was magnificent in appearance. Two, it came from the ancient world. Three, it would last to the end of time. Four, it could be shaped. Five, it would accept carved messages of respect and belief.
Then he closed his mouth and sat down on the floor.
People stared at the wild young man, their mouths gaping. They turned to each other, dumb with wonder, their faces reflecting unasked questions. And then, from every corner, in the safety of their numbers, voices began to attack him. What did he know? How could he be so foolish, so impractical? They could easily ferry wood, but how could anyone transport stone? Beneath each complaint and accusation lay an ignoble question: Who was he, a moody killer, to tell them they were wrong? Their words danced like sparks across the shadows of the Long House.
He rose and spoke again. His high-pitched voice sounded something like a girl’s, and he looked lean and disturbing. He didn’t say, “You fools!” but his tone conveyed it.
“Don’t you understand? Stone is unyielding but not unfriendly. The
marks we make on it will last forever. What could be more suited to remind us and our children’s children of who has gone before?”
But he was speaking to people who had never thought deeply of stone. To them stone was like air or water—no personality until you do something with it, and it lies out there in the fields, doing nothing and with badges of moss all over it. What more was to be said of it, except that it yielded a good axe now and then?
The young man had little concern for what Newgrange thought. Like many great people, all he cared about was what he felt and what he wanted to do. The force of his passion made everyone peer at him, and the light from the fire made him look more mysterious. His head of tawny hair seemed to flare wilder. The wrinkles on his frown grew darker, his deep-set eyes lost in the shadows of his face.
Slamming one fist repeatedly into the palm of the other hand, he made point after point.
“I sense more things than I can name. I understand more than I can describe. Visions come to me and flashes of light that I can’t explain. But all of you—you all have such feelings. Look for them in your heart.”
In a voice powerful enough to fight off all comers, he told them that one of life’s greatest mysteries lay within stone. No matter how it was approached, whether attacked, caressed, or cut wide open, stone never surrendered the story of its origins.
“As with ourselves,” he said, “we don’t know where it came from. It must have belonged to the beginning of the world.”