So It Begins

In the deepness of time. The calm breathing of millions of years. An inland sea falls dry, evaporates beneath the blazing sun; the basin becomes a wasteland of salt. Sol Invictus. The searing heat of the deep desert — rain evaporates before it hits the ground, a fine mineral spray settles on the earth’s surface.

And then, at the end of that silent, motionless epoch — there is no one to witness the wonder of the continent’s tectonic fracture — a breach opens between the Atlantic Ocean and what will become the Mediterranean Sea. Foaming and churning, the water breaks through the rift and descends on the saline desert; the waters rise a few metres each day.

First, the basin fills from Gibraltar to Sicily; then comes the eastern part, to the coasts of Turkey and the Levant. Mare Nostrum. Yam Gadol. Akdeniz. Cragged mountaintops stick out like islands.

The crack between the Eurasian and African plates is but a scratch in the earth’s crust; still it divides the continents resolutely. Here is here and there is there.

From the flank of her mountain, the Neanderthal woman whose bones will be found one day in a cave on the Rock of Gibraltar can see the mountain on the far side of the strait, Jebel Musa, shimmering in the light. Does she see signs of human life there? Pillars of smoke on the horizon? Does she have thoughts about the other?

The life there does not impinge on hers. Too far away.

Sixty kilometres long is the Strait of Gibraltar, at its narrowest only fourteen wide; there is a powerful current. Dreaded by sailors. Sandbanks, headlands, reefs, the treacherous Boreas. The fog that drops in suddenly, obscuring the far shore.

Rising up on both sides, the Pillars of Hercules: the Rock of Gibraltar in Europe and Jebel Musa in Africa. Marking the end of the world. So far, and no further. He who ventures past this point becomes lost in the mist beyond.

More water dissipates from the Mediterranean than the Nile, the Rhone, and other rivers can replenish; there is a huge influx from the Atlantic. At the same time, through the Strait an undercurrent of heavy, saline water slips back into the ocean.

Current, counter-current, wind, contrary wind; it rages between the mountains on both sides of the Strait. All you can do is brace yourself and pray to be saved.

Six thousand years ago, not far from Gibraltar, on a rock close to Jimena de la Frontera, someone drew an ochre-coloured ship; it has a sail, oars are sticking out from the gunwale. It is the world’s oldest depiction of a sailing ship. Perhaps it is a ship used for fishing along the coast, perhaps for commerce between Europe and Africa — though no evidence exists for such early traffic between the continents.

For a Bronze Age vessel, the route from Spain to Morocco would have been a risky enough enterprise; a venture from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic would have meant its certain demise. The end of the world is the death by drowning that awaits you there.

Still, someone was the first to get past the Strait of Gibraltar. Steely waves below him, their cold gleam. The sea of monsters and sunken empires. The ocean without an other side.

The captain’s name has been lost to time. A Cretan, blown by the storm? Or else a Phoenician, shipwrecked in the mist? A current under sea picked his bones in whispers …

Galley men at their oars, the Phoenicians row past the Pillars, against the Atlantic current. They establish the trading post of Mogador on the African coast and the colony of Gadir at the mouth of the Spanish Guadalquivir. The Carthaginian explorer Hanno makes it to the Gulf of Guinea, and returns home with stories of burning mountains and women covered in fur.

Herodotus reports that the Phoenicians have rounded Africa, with, as footnote, ‘something I cannot believe, but perhaps another may’.

In the year 711 after Christ, General Tariq ibn Ziyad crosses to Europe at the head of seven thousand Berber soldiers, to conquer the land of the Visigoths. The current drags at his ships. Rough swells, waves roll solidly, barely fluid, beneath the fleet of feluccas; row after row are smashed upon the arid coastline. He lands at the beaches by Gibraltar, the rock that will bear his name: Jabal Tariq.

The wind beats at your ears and silences your thoughts. You want to hide from it, from the chill Levanter blowing through the funnel of the Strait.

Navigational instruments improve, and in the Middle Ages there appear portolan charts, showing every shallow and every headland around the Mediterranean; the Strait of Gibraltar, however, is still shunned like the plague. Captains’ charts and nautical almanacs may be reliable, but current, wind, and sudden mist are not.

After the Moors are driven out of Europe, British and Dutch merchants begin appearing in the Strait from the sixteenth century — flapping above the harbourfronts of the Mediterranean one sees not only the Venetian lion, the Genoan cross, and the Ottoman crescent, but also the Union Jack and the tricolour of the Republic.

The inland sea becomes a European sea. Shipyards everywhere; countless vessels raise anchor, triumph, are sunk or destroyed by storms. Just as one cannot apprehend all those beautiful horses devoured by the ogre of war, neither can one fathom the ships that go down, the shattered galleys, caravels, galleons, and windjammers — the seabed waits for them patiently.

With the help of the Dutch, the British conquer the Rock of Gibraltar in 1704 and never relinquish it again. Napoleon, Mussolini, and Generalissimo Franco stare at it till their eyes water; stoically, the British hunker down further into their rock.

After the Second World War — twenty-seven submarines alone are sent to the bottom of the Strait — the merchant ships return. Cruise ships follow. A tinkling glass of gin and tonic in hand — ‘Easy on the T, please …’ — the passengers roll through the Pillars of Hercules and then on past the ruins of Carthage, Troy, and Knossos.

Gibraltar is unsuited for mass tourism, although the Rock itself is an attraction and the conditions at Tarifa a drawcard for windsurfers. In spring and autumn, the Strait is a corridor for migratory birds — tourists from around the world stand oohing and ahing from behind their binoculars and tele-lenses.

On the far side, along the African coast, migrants from Morocco and sub-Saharan Africa await their chance to cross. Europe lies in plain sight: on a clear day, white buildings stand out against the rocky coast. So close, just one little leap …

They come in clapped-out fishing boats and even in truck tyre inner tubes; since the turn of the century, a few thousand of them have drowned in the Strait. In Ksar es-Seghir, a fisherman looks out over the high waves and sighs: ‘Around here, you’re more likely to find a corpse in your net than a fish.’

On the far shore, in the cemetery of Santo Cristo de las Ánimas in Tarifa, a corner behind white pickets has been reserved for the nameless dead who wash ashore. Tufts of hardy grass bend beneath the wind. A column of vultures and storks rides the thermal, round and round, in endless orbit. Far below, the flash of a ship — the ferry from Tangier to Algeciras.