Late afternoon, late summer: harvest time in the mountains to the north of the Carso. Smell of woodsmoke, meadow. Wooden cabins with steep eaves speaking of heavy winter snowfall. An old man sitting in a chair drawn up to a western gable end, eyes closed, catching the last of the sun. Long-handled scythes leaning against walls, cut grass on the blades. Cyclamens in the shade, purple fungi poking through leaf litter under the beeches. Apple trees here and there, lit by small yellow fruit. The land’s surface dimpled with grassed-in sinkholes. It is one of the most peaceful landscapes through which I have ever walked.
Then we follow, because we are curious as to where it leads, a side path that turns away from the open ground of meadows and cabins, curving gently through beech and oak, and then angling up, the trees thinning in number but growing in height, poplars now, their leaves hissing in the wind.
We walk the path in innocence because we do not know what is at its end, and through the poplars we can see golden reefs of cloud massing out over the sea, black on their undersides. The sun is warm on our faces, the rich smell of the meadow grass is thickening to rank – and then there is the first of the marks, cut deeply into the pale bark, and there is the edge of the chasm.
In front of us a sinkhole drops into blackness. Its sides are buttresses of grey limestone, softened by moss. The mouth of the sinkhole is twenty feet across at its widest point. To look into it is to feel the beckoning lurch of an unguarded edge. From the upper slopes of the mouth grow sapling beech, perched on ledges, leaning over the drop. Ferns flourish in stone niches.
Gouged into the trunks of the bigger trees around the sinkhole are swastikas. Some are old, because the bark has begun to heal them. Some are fresh; made that year, perhaps, or the year previously. The wood in the cut-lines is still pale. Some of the swastikas have themselves been scored through by knifepoint. The bark is a conflict zone of mark-making.
Nailed to the trunk of a beech near the lip of the sinkhole is a metal sheet, two feet or so high, and blotched with algae. Written on it in black ink is a long poem in Slovenian, entitled ‘Razčlovečenje’. At the bottom of the poem is scrawled the word ‘PAX’.
‘Its title means something like “Dehumanization”, or “Becoming Unhuman”,’ says Lucian quietly. ‘My Slovenian isn’t good enough to read the rest properly.’
He points to the last line of the text, which has been added with an asterisk: a postscript to the main poem.
‘This, though . . .’ He pauses. ‘This is a curse of some kind. A curse or warning against anyone who might try to destroy or harm the poem.’
The warning has not been heeded. Parts of the poem have been scratched by blade or stone, in an effort to erase the words. Other words have been written across its text – and they in turn have been scored through. In a top corner, another swastika has been cut into the metal, bright and fresh.
I feel a sudden horror reaching up and out of the sinkhole to coil around my heart. Something terrible has taken place here, and continues to reverberate.
‘Look,’ says Lucian, pointing north through the canopy. There are thunderheads over the peaks now. Rain is drifting in heavy ropes far to the west. There is a distant sense of fury. Out over the ocean the gold light has become a slick yellow.
What happened here? The mouth of the chasm says nothing. The trees say nothing. Leaning over the edge of the sinkhole, I can see only darkness beneath me.
~
Earlier, Lucian and I leave his house in the Carso and travel north towards Slovenia, where the limestone rucks into sheer peaks and deep river valleys. Visible to the north are the spires of the Julian Alps, a towering limestone range where some of the most severe fighting of the so-called White War – the series of battles at the border of Austria-Hungary and Italy – took place between 1915 and 1918. There is, Lucian says, a peak high in the range he wants to reach that has been tunnelled out by war – as so many of the mountains across the front were hollowed during the conflict, for the purposes of taking shelter and of giving death.
At the Julians our plan is to separate, and from there I will walk east for three days into Slovenia, over the shoulder of Triglav, the highest mountain of the region, and down to the blue lake of Bled – though the forecast is for snow on Triglav, which would make such a journey on foot hard. Before reaching the Julians Lucian wants to show me some of the higher ground of the Slovenian karst, where extensive beech forests shelter wolves and bears, and where, Lucian says, a cave system contains an extraordinary presence.
Maria Carmen and I embrace as I leave their house on the Carso. I thank her for all that she has given me. She holds me at arm’s length by the bowl of dried pomegranates in the porch.
‘Robert, you are . . . a, a, a bellissimo animate!’
‘Maria Carmen, that is about the nicest thing anyone has ever called me,’ I say. ‘If I had business cards, I’d print that on them as my profession. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.’
As we drive north, gaining height on switchback roads, I ask Lucian if I was right to have heard her comment as a compliment.
‘Oh yes,’ he says, ‘the highest of compliments. Maria Carmen regards animals as far more impressive than humans. To her, heart and kindness are more important than any honorifics or degrees.’
We follow the shore-road of a lake called Doberdò. It is completely dry: a grassy meadow through which bare limestone shows in places, several acres in extent.
‘Doberdò is what I think in English is called a “turlough”,’ says Lucian, ‘an intermittent lake that wells up from underneath and within the rock when the rains come and the water level rises – but that drains dry in the summer months.’
The roads are lined with cypress trees, planted in commemoration of the dead of the armies that fought here in the course of two world wars. The trees have elegant boles shaped like candle flames, burning green.
‘Neither of the world wars has ever really left this region,’ says Lucian. ‘Brush fires in the Vipava Valley caused unexploded First World War ordnance to go off last summer. You could hardly have a better metaphor for the politics of this area.’
We pass through Nova Gorica, a border town. ‘TITO’ has been sprayed twice on the exit road in blue paint, reversed on either side of the central line so that it can be read by drivers coming in both directions.
The road rises to a pass and then drops down to a bridge over the Isonzo. The Isonzo runs bluer than any river I have ever seen. It is the blue of Cherenkov radiation, beautiful and chilling.
Lucian pulls over in a lay-by above the bridge.
‘A century ago it would have been death to try to go from here to there,’ he says, pointing to the bluffs of limestone that rise to either side of the bridge. I realize that the rock of the bluffs is unnaturally textured: perforated with squared-off holes and portals.
‘It’s Swiss cheese, this stone,’ says Lucian. ‘Warrened by war. The high ground is a honeycomb of gun emplacements, access tunnels and chambers. The low ground is all trenches and foxholes. They burrowed into the mountains; they made a war-machine of the landscape. You’ll see even more of this from the First World War when we get up into the Julians, where the snow was heavier and the fighting, if possible, more desperate.’
I have, again, a powerful sense of this landscape as one in which geology both produces and confirms ways of feeling. Here in this hollow terrain of the karst, historical memory behaves like flowing water, disappearing without warning, only to resurge under new names, in new places, with fresh force. Here in this topography of cavities and clandestine places, dark pasts get hidden, then brought to the light again.
We have entered a contested frontier region – part of the Julian March, the name given to the border zone of what are now Italy, Slovenia, Croatia and even Carinthia. Cultures and languages have mingled productively here, but this is also where groups perceiving themselves to be of different ethnic or national identities have visited appalling persecutions upon one another. Traces of conflict are still scored into the physical terrain (trenches, mass graves, monuments), archiving and perpetuating a modern human geography of violence and displacement.
We climb higher. The reflected light off the sea still silvers the sky to our south. There are cheerily coloured beehives, ranged in rows in fields set back from the road. Wild-flower meadows, small vineyards.
We cross a wide pass between high peaks. Beech and pine have thickened in the lower ground, and I can smell resin in the cooler air. A sense of mountain communities and forest wilderness grows. The extent of the woods here makes a nonsense of human frontier lines. Beeches march over borders.
Dapple of shade. Pools of light. A glade, a meadow, a hut. Caves everywhere visible in the cliffs, hidden in the forests. Dips between trees where sinkholes have collapsed, filled, regrown. Big slides of light tilt down hillsides. The upper ridge of one mountain is holed by a window-like gap running right through it, the ancient relic of a long-vanished river. Through the window I can see blue sky and clouds, framed by stone: a surrealist’s canvas.
Where the treeline breaks against cliffs, distant beech trunks stand smooth against the rock. Two winters previously, western Slovenia was struck by a severe snowstorm that coated millions of trees in ice, leaving them so heavy that their root systems were unable to bear the weight of their frozen canopies. Millions of trees died, toppled by the burden of their own crowns.
Another valley is sheer-sided on its eastern flank, with 400-foot-high white cliffs rearing almost from the road. Plumb in the centre of one is a cave mouth, and out of that mouth roars a silver river which plummets to a plunge pool at the cliff’s base. Rainbows drift in the spray.
I have never seen a feature like it. It defies all the usual geological and fluvial rules. Rivers are not meant to issue from the centre of cliffs. But then the earth is not meant to have tides, and mountains are not meant to have windows – and caves are not meant to grow glaciers.
We find the glacier-cave sunk high in the mountains, where the beech trees grow to sixty feet or more and the canopy is so thick we can hardly see the sky. We follow a thin contouring path, knotty with tree roots, through the forest. The air is heavy, hot.
As we walk, Lucian explains the glacier’s existence to me, but I can hardly believe what he is saying to be true. A flowing river of ice at this height, in this heat? There is no lying snow for many miles around.
‘This cave system is a mile in length, nearly 400 metres deep, and it perforates an entire mountain from one side to another,’ says Lucian. ‘The free movement of wind along the cave system, combined with the chill of the rock itself, keeps the temperatures within the system well below freezing. Snow gathers in the cave mouths in the winter, blown deep into it by the northerly winds, and – hey presto! – over thousands of years, the snow becomes a long thin glacier, winding within the mountain.’
The ground begins to fall away to the left of the path. We are soon on the edge of a huge doline, perhaps 150 feet across. The far side is near vertical, but our side slopes at fifty degrees or so, and a thin track switchbacks down into the chasm, where a cave mouth gapes.
With each hairpin of the path, the air chills around us. I have never before experienced such a precipitous temperature gradient. Thirty degrees Celsius at the doline’s edge becomes twenty-five degrees Celsius within sixteen vertical feet, and so it drops as we drop, and though we pushed first through tepid air, soon an evening cool is around us, and then as we approach the cave mouth, 100 feet down, the air prickles cold as metal in the nose, our breath feathers in front of us and then we pass into a fine silver mist – the breath of the glacier itself.
The steep temperature gradient produces a steeply raked ecology. The trees shrink in size with each turn of the path, from towering beeches to bonsai pines near the cave’s belly, clinging on in the arctic temperatures. By the entrance to the maw, where the temperature rarely rises above freezing, there is only moss and lichen matting – a low polar tundra. The smells at this depth are wholly different from those of the Carso and the forests; instead of heat, herbs, resin and stone, here is moss, winter and ice.
Lucian and I scramble down a short slab of rock, cross the threshold of the cave and step into darkness. I glance back up through the mist to see a crescent of blue sky still visible, meshed with beech branches. I remember the arch of light left behind as we entered the Parisian catacombs. I sense movement in the cave’s far corner: a creature of some kind, big and powerful.
Cold is burning my ears and fizzing in my teeth. Underfoot is a hard crust of rocks and debris – lichen, twigs, bones – fallen from the sinkhole’s sides, oddly fixed to the touch. Then between two lying branches I see a gleam of blue-black metal. I kick at it with my toe, feel my foot skid. Not metal – ice.
‘We’re on it,’ I call out. ‘Lucian, we’re on a glacier! It exists!’
Lucian doffs an invisible hat, mock-bows.
Treading carefully now, we move on towards the furthest reach of the cave. The mess of the threshold thins out, and we are walking on blue-white ice that slopes away and down to the corner where the creature lurks.
The creature is a sinkhole in the ice – a vertical shaft cut down into the glacier by the action of meltwater. The ice slopes towards the sinkhole and so too does the light, as if pulled into it. We approach it with care – this black hole set within blue-black ice – conscious of our unsteady footing, of how easy a slip would be. A few yards from its edge we stop and regard it briefly, shivering and chilled.
Returning to the rock slab down which we have earlier climbed, we hear a call.
‘Živjo! Hello! You want some help?’ A man is at the top of the slab and he reaches an open hand down to help us up the final tricky moves, one after the other. A woman is standing on flat ground above the slab, wrapped up against the cold in an ankle-length sheepskin coat. Her chest bulges and squirms, and then a little poodle pokes its head out from between the lapels of the coat, yapping at us.
‘That’s a fine hot-water bottle you have there!’ I say.
‘We keep each other warm!’ she replies, stroking the dog’s head, laughing.
An eagle spiralling far above looks down through the sunlit green-gold canopy, past tall old beech trunks, past the lichen that hangs in wisps from the lower branches, past the gentians that bloom blue amid the leaf litter, down the sides of the sinkhole, past the sloped band of tundra and the bonsai pines, to where Lucian and I stand talking with the man, the woman and her poodle in the mouth of the ice cave, all of us laughing now.
~
It is late afternoon, elsewhere in the upland beech forests, when we come to the place of horror.
We pass through the meadows by the wooden cabins, we follow that footpath up through the woods, past the trunks of the trees with their swastikas scored into them, and we come to a halt at the sinkhole’s edge, where the text on the sheet of metal is nailed to the beech, as the clouds build over the sea.
Between 1941 and 1945 the limestone of southern central Europe – from the Cansiglio plateau below the Dolomites, across and down into what was then Yugoslavia – became the site of a brutal conflict. In April 1941, Yugoslavia was invaded by the Axis powers. It was captured and trisected, with Italy occupying southern Slovenia and Ljubljana, Hungary annexing the Prekmurje region, and Nazi Germany taking northern and eastern Slovenia. Germany and Italy soon began ethnic-cleansing activities in their new territories, deporting, resettling, driving out and killing thousands of Slovenes.
In response, partisan groups began to form across the Julian March and beyond with the aim of resisting the occupations. These anti-Fascist resistance groups – nicknamed ‘the woodchoppers’, and becoming increasingly left-wing in affiliation as the occupation continued, until formally declaring Communist alignment in March 1943 when they united with Tito’s partisan army – largely took the forests of the karst as their fortress and battleground. They fought nel bosco, in and with the woods. The British and Americans, aware of the power of these partisan troops, began to invest arms and intelligence in their operations. Among the officers sent to support the partisans was Fitzroy Maclean – later famous as the author of Eastern Approaches (1949), an account of his time with the resistance in the Yugoslav mountains – and John Earle, Maclean’s liaison agent with the Slovene and northern Italian partisans.
The high karst was perfect for strike-and-retreat partisan tactics in occupied territory. Dense forest cover meant ground activity was hard to see from aircraft. Steep-sided valleys and the prevalence of sinkholes made it difficult to move heavy vehicles off the main roads and tracks. Ambushes could be planned on the narrow mountain roads, with attackers firing down onto vehicles before melting away into the woods again, pursuit almost impossible. The ubiquity of natural caves, and the readiness of the limestone to be enlarged into tunnels and chambers by blasting and excavation, made it the ideal geology for a guerrilla war. Weapons stores, sleeping places, even field hospitals were established in the rock, with sly systems of tunnels used to disperse woodsmoke from underground fires, so that the smoke did not rise in a column and betray a position.
From the summer of 1942, seeking to counteract the growing partisan threat, Italian authorities started to create their own ‘anti-Communist’ militia among ethnic Slovenes, named first the ‘White Guard’ and then – under Nazi command – the ‘Slovene Home Guard’. A brutal civil war developed in the forests and the villages of the karst, aligned chiefly along Fascist-Communist divisions, but also inflaming hostilities between the partisans and Catholic activists in Slovenia. Nationalism, religion and revenge tangled terribly together. Large-scale reprisal killings began to be exercised upon the civilian populations, as well as between fighters.
The worst phases of these reprisal killings came in two waves: in the autumn of 1943, after the Italian surrender, and then during the notorious Quaranta Giorni, or Forty Days, of the Yugoslav administration of Trieste, following the fall of the city to New Zealand troops in early May 1945. During these terrible periods, geology and atrocity intersected: the landscape of the karst – which had served the partisans so well in terms of shelter and concealment – was repurposed for mass murder.
Sinkholes, caves, ravines and mineshafts throughout the limestone regions of Venezia Giulia and Istria became the locations of individual executions and group killings, carried out predominantly by Communist partisans but also by Fascist militias. Civilian and military victims were transported to the edges of sinkholes, and there were pushed alive, wounded or dead into these chasms in the limestone. In some cases, victims were bound to one another by barbed wire. Others were buried in scooped graves in the forests. The caves and glades of the karst filled with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bodies. These extrajudicial killings are known today, especially by Italians, as the ‘ foibe massacres’ – from foiba, meaning a ‘sinkhole used for killing’. The bodies of those executed are still being disinterred in the shallow soils of deep woodland, or down in the sinkholes, where cavers will occasionally encounter human bones, bullets, rusting wire.
History itself possesses its own burials and exhumations. The history of the foibe killings is still today heavily contested, not least because for decades it was deeply submerged. In the years after the war ended, a strategic ‘good-neighbour’ policy emerged between Italy and Yugoslavia that encouraged the forgetting of the atrocities. Italian politicians seeking to rebuild a united Italy saw little benefit in focusing on the crimes carried out by partisan troops on both sides. Yugoslav leaders rejected evidence of the existence of Communist atrocities, preferring to emphasize the suffering under Fascism experienced by Slavs, and to align their cause symbolically with the ultimate atrocity of the Holocaust. While the consequences of the partisan war played themselves out damagingly in individual and family contexts across the Julian March, in public discourse it was mostly relegated to la politica sommersa, ‘submerged politics’.
It is primarily over the past three decades that the foibe killings have surfaced again in the public sphere, becoming an intensely controversial subject in the region. For Slovenes and those broadly on the left, the details of the foibe killings are seen to have been lavishly exaggerated by the right for purposes of propaganda and political leverage. For Italians and those broadly on the right, the foibe atrocities serve as a convenient shorthand for all the reprisal killings, jailings and deportations that happened to Italians during and after the end of the war – and they stand, too, reflexively, for the ways in which the post-war Communist governments of these areas disposed of the history of these persecutions. The language of this ongoing debate is riddled with subterranean imagery, literal and metaphorical. Images of light and dark, burial and exhumation, concealment and revelation run through the discussions: historiography and topography tangle with one another. The numbers and identities of those who died in foibe vary considerably, with the numbers given often depending on the political alignment of the researcher in question. In all cases, at stake is what Pamela Ballinger – in her major study of ‘the terrain of memory’ at the borders of the Balkans – refers to as ‘autochthonous . . . rights’, meaning the battle for the right to claim authentically to ‘belong’ to a given area of land, rock and soil.
The foibe have also become focal points for contemporary right-wing and fascist groups seeking to stoke popular patriotism and fire anger against perceived left-wing influence in government. The sinkholes have become sites of ritual return for Italian nationalists and exiles. Commemoration marches are held, ending at foibe. Swastikas and other marks or mottos are often inscribed at the site. Priests perform annual services of remembrance. Bones of the infoibati (those killed in the foibe ) have been displayed as versions of sacred relic. At the most notorious of the foibe – in fact a mineshaft – near a village called Basovizza/Bazovica in the north-east of the Carso, a few miles from Trieste, two contrasting monuments have been established: one commemorating those killed by Yugoslav partisans in the shaft, and one commemorating the ‘heroes of Bazovica’: four Slovenians shot in 1930 for anti-Fascist activities. The mineshaft at Basovizza/Bazovica was sealed in 1959, in a ceremony carried out by a Catholic priest and attended by 2,000 people, because the deposition of explosives at the time of the killings made the subsequent safe exhumation of the victims’ bodies impossible. Because detailed scrutiny of the contents of this foiba is unfeasible, it has remained a void – susceptible to multiple projections of claim and belief. More hopefully, the village is also now home to the Elettra Sincrotrone, an international research centre that involves people from all the neighbouring countries and affiliations: it, too, is underground.
Basovizza/Bazovica has become, more even than the other known foibe, an example of what Pierre Nora calls ‘lieux de memoire’, ‘memory-sites’: places in a landscape where the meanings of history are most actively created and contested. The matter of the foibe continues to resist closure. By keeping these sites ‘open’, so the history of the past continues to wound the present.
~
High in the Slovenian beech woods, as a storm grows to the southwest, Lucian and I have found our way to the edge of a foiba now known as Grobišče Brezno za lesniko, the Wild Apple-Tree Shaft Grave. The details of what happened here, as at all the foibe, remain unclear and highly disputed. At some point in May 1945, between forty and eighty people – some of them Italian police, some of them Slovene Home Guard, some of them civilians – are alleged to have been marched through the trees, along the curving track that Lucian and I have also followed, to this chasm. Here they were either killed at its edge and pushed in, or pushed alive into its depths.
The swastikas cut into the tree bark have been made recently by right-wing protestors, who march to this foiba, as they do to others, in order to protest the killings and to commemorate those who died here. The scorings-out of the swastikas have been done by objectors from the other side. And the poem has been written by someone chiefly in memory of the victims, lest they be left voiceless by the battles of claim and counterclaim.
Later, a Slovenian friend will translate the poem for me. I should have warned her about where I had found it, what it might contain. I did not anticipate the powers of horror that the text possesses:
Dehumanization
But despite it all, they were people like you and me.
Who are you? The living thrown into the madness,
Killed with clubs and stabbed,
Here crucified and no cross for you.
But O, you humans,
Your bones in the bottomless pit,
They were people like you and me,
Killed in the golden freedom.
As you pass by, stop for a while,
Think of your wrists bleeding in the dark night,
Barbed wire wrapped around them,
As they, cursing, goad you on,
Beaten, naked, a corpse still living,
You can hear the blows of the rifle butts,
The screams, the groans, the terror turning into the sweetness
Of approaching death.
The fear, the pain, are vanishing,
The footsteps echoing towards the void.
In the bottomless pit countless numbers of them lie,
But despite it all: they were people like you and me.
PS: A curse be upon anyone who might attempt to erase this record.
Imagine yourself as victim, the poem orders its readers. Think yourself into the skin of another human, for then – sunk into a different being – you will surely find yourself unable to inflict suffering. It is as unsettling a text as I know: the vividness of the scene of execution it conjures, the curse it threatens as protection against its own erasure. The poem at once challenges and charges its reader, both forbidding and demanding response. Above all, it is a poem about compassion – about feeling as another feels. To the poem’s author, the darkness of the ‘bottomless pit’ represents the utter failure of empathy that characterized the war in those regions, as it must of necessity characterize war at all times and in all places.
~
Apple trees by the roadside, their fruit yellow as lamps. Steady lift of the land. Wide river valleys, and pale limestone peaks rising higher to either side. A vaulted blue sky, strong sun gleaming off stone. We are passing through a mountain paradise, but we drive in silence. The foiba has shaken me deeply, and it has shaken Lucian too, I sense, familiar though he is with the hidden violence that this landscape contains.
Birches on the turn, now, leaves seething sulphur. Bindweed flowering white in the hedges. A southerly breeze sets the poplars shaking. Air cools as we gain height. The air brightens. The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst . . .
What is the relationship of beauty and atrocity in a landscape such as this? Is it possible, even responsible, to take pleasure in such a place? What had Anselm Kiefer written? I think there is no innocent landscape, that doesn’t exist . . . I recall Kiefer’s paintings of German forests: tall-trunked, shadowed woodlands that bewilder and entrap the viewer, their trees often nourished by the cruelty that has occurred among them. Kiefer’s Europe carries an immanent history of guilt and pain. Pines grow tall on bones. Kiefer longs for – but disdains as futile – a soteriology whereby our sins might be absolved by the earth’s own stigmata.
The true peaks of the Julian Alps are now beginning to show on the horizon: a Gothic dream-range. Limestone summits spiral up to towered tops. Structures of hollow and fold replicate up and down the scales, from ridges and valleys to the water-scores on a single boulder. Matter shifts appearance, changes place. It is hard to tell cloud from snowfield from pale rock-face.
I think of W. G. Sebald’s writing about landscape and the relics of violence; how his narrator in The Rings of Saturn, walking the tranquil but chronically militarized coastline of East Anglia, becomes preoccupied to the point of ‘paralysing horror’ by the combination of an ‘unaccustomed sense of freedom’ in the landscape with ‘the traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past, that were evident even in that remote place’. I remember taking a friend to the former nuclear weapons test site of Orford Ness off the Suffolk coast – where Sebald had also been – and seeing her weep uncontrollably on its shingle bank by the brown waves of the North Sea. The state violence latent at the Ness had caused the surfacing in her, unbidden, of memories of a cruel relationship in which she suffered for several years. The violent event persists like crushed glass in one’s eyes. The light it generates, rather than helping us to see, is blinding.
We are up into the heart of the Julian Alps now, and at a turn in the road, where it crosses a river bridge, we see an elderly woman sitting alone on a shingle beach by the water. She is in a wheelchair, pushed out among the shore boulders. She wears big dark glasses, dark amber in tint, and her legs are wrapped in a green blanket. Her hands are placed together on the blanket, and she is looking without moving into the whirling blue water of the river. It is not clear how she has arrived there or how she will leave, but she seems to be at peace by the current.
Dissonance is produced by any landscape that enchants in the present but has been a site of violence in the past. But to read such a place only for its dark histories is to disallow its possibilities for future life, to deny reparation or hope – and this is another kind of oppression. If there is a way of seeing such landscapes, it might be thought of as ‘occulting’: the nautical term for a light that flashes on and off, and in which the periods of illumination are longer than the periods of darkness. The Slovenian karst is an ‘occulting’ landscape in this sense, defined by the complex interplay of light and dark, of past pain and present beauty. I have walked through numerous occulting landscapes over the years: from the cleared valleys of northern Scotland, where the scattered stones of abandoned houses are oversung by skylarks; to the Guadarrama mountains north of Madrid, where a savage partisan war was fought among ancient pines, under the gaze of vultures; and to the disputed valleys of the Palestinian West Bank, where dog foxes slip through barbed wire. All of these landscapes offer the reassurance of nature’s return; all incite the discord of profound suffering coexisting with generous life.
A mile or so up the river valley from where the woman sits watching the water a stream tumbles down to the main river from a side valley. This is marked on the map as the ‘Rio Bianco’, the White Torrent, and it is to be our path up to the high tops where war was waged exactly a hundred years earlier. We set off from the road-head along a thin track through the beech woods that fringe the stream. The path itself is lightning white where it has been worn to bedrock. It strikes up and on between the trees.
Holes in the trunks of the beeches hold micro-gardens of moss and ferns. Dwarf pines spread between the boulders of the stream-bank. Harebells, gentians and edelweiss star the understorey. Little trout flick as quick shadows in the bigger stream-pools. Towering above us are scree-slopes and bone-white summits jagging several hundred feet up from the ridge line. Can we really be going up there? Always to our left is the Bianco, pooling and splashing. It is a mysterious and wilful presence, a fine companion for our ascent on that hot day, and soon I can resist its invitation no longer.
‘Lucian, I’m going to use the stream as my way up.’
‘Enjoy. I’ll stay dry, I think, and I’ll see you up in the cirque.’ He gestures up to cloud level. ‘Head towards the junction of valleys, and then hook left and up. You’ll find yourself in a big, flat-bottomed corrie, with a small bivouac hut bound to the rock by iron cables. We’ll meet again there in, what, three hours? Four?’
He wanders on into the woods, and I clamber down to walk the stream.
Sunlight blazes off stone. I hop from rock to rock, climb the bigger boulders, clamber up the faces of plunge pools, and where the stream runs deep and wide I just wade through it, relishing the snowmelt bite of the water on feet and shins. There are water-worn humps of limestone as smooth as skin. Little spill-pools have their own white-sand beaches a few inches wide. Each new section of the stream poses a different puzzle of ascent.
It is a beautiful stream for the whiteness of its light, and it is a strange stream because it tricks. In the stiller pools, the water is transparent to the point of seeming absent, and more than once I stop to dip a hand to prove the water is still there.
The challenge, really, is to keep moving at all, for each pool is inviting as a place to wait and jabble, and each side-stream beckons its own following. At last, in a waterfall-fed basin of polished limestone twelve feet wide, its lower rim giving a view across the valley to a pillowy peak beyond, I swim. It is a natural infinity pool, and I wallow in it for five minutes or so, letting the waterfall pummel my back until it numbs.
I proceed lazily upwards, boulder-hopping, stopping, each rapid luring me up and on, each pool detaining me, until the sides of the gorge become high enough that I risk getting trapped. So I climb out using tree roots for ropes. Seven chamois watch – with the feigned disinterest of true voyeurs – a near-naked man dressed in little but a rucksack clamber over a gorge-edge into a glade, and there re-clothe himself.
From the glade it is up again, the path switchbacking past a hut in a clearing, the trees diminishing in size as height is gained. Purple scabious remind me of the chalklands of home. As I ascend, towering beeches shrink to ten-foot-high mature trees, then to a wide scrub forest, forked with different paths. The scrub is of pines and glossy-leaved pin oak, and the trees stand first at head height, then at shoulder height, then at waist height, then they are gone altogether – and I am out into ground scoured clear of trees by altitude and avalanche.
Bare rock, shrill whistles of marmots echoing, the peaks pressing closer around. Rock towers rising, their forms continued above by the white-bossed thunderheads that are building in the sky, and continued invisibly below by the chasms and cave systems that descend from the landscape’s surface.
Flocks of finches sweep across the pines below me, vanishing with a flutter amid the leaves. I climb up through a boulder field to reach the corrie’s belly and there, lashed to a flat boulder by steel cables to brace it against ferocious winter storms, is the bivouac hut Lucian mentioned. It is little more than a metal capsule. I open the front door. The space is just high enough to stand up in. Six bunks, three on either side of the space. Stacks of blankets neatly folded on the beds, two full jerrycans of water. A life-saving outpost. But where is Lucian?
I lie down to wait on a promontory of grass near the hut. Warm wind. Pincushions of alpine flora. Clouds, rock, marmot whistle, happiness. Raven cries hexing off the cliffs. Clink of stone-fall, hoof-hit of ibex – ibex! – just twenty yards away. The hum of something like silence. The corrie is horseshoed by a great curling wave of limestone, rising to peaks and falling to sharp notches. I know our eventual destination lies to the west, but have no idea how we will reach it.
Half an hour later, Lucian emerges over the lip of the corrie, hot but cheery. I passed him somewhere in the scrub maze without realizing it. We eat apples and drink river water there by the shelter.
‘In winter the snow drifts to fifteen, twenty feet here,’ he says. ‘This gets buried.’
‘This place lifts my heart,’ I say to Lucian. ‘Thank you for bringing me here.’
‘I’m glad, Rob,’ he replies. ‘There was war here too, sadly, although you wouldn’t necessarily know it by looking around. They burrowed through rock and scaled cliffs to get at the enemy. But here more men were killed by the winter conditions than by bullets.’
Across the Dolomites and the Julians, retreating glaciers have begun to disclose their contents from the conflict a century earlier: rifles, crates of ammunition, unsent love letters, diaries and bodies. Two teenage Austrian soldiers have surfaced from a glacier in Trentino, lying top to toe beside one another, each with a bullet wound to the skull. Three Hapsburg soldiers melted out of an ice wall, hanging upside down near the peak of San Matteo at an altitude of 12,000 feet. The problem is not that things become buried deep in strata – but that they endure . . .
From the refuge, we begin the proper climbing. Up towards a notch in the ridge on a tongue of scree: two steps up, one step back. Sugary snowfields to cross, punching through with each step. Hard, hot, private work. Helmets on now to guard against rockfall. We reach the notch. It is an extreme place. We sit astride it facing one another, as if upon a horse, for here the rock is a spine a foot or so wide. To the south is a huge fall-line, dropping several thousand feet to the white ribbon of limestone that marks the path of the Isonzo, its water shining blue even from this height amid the dark green pines of the valley.
Ahead of us the ridge leads off in peaks, fins and drops. These are the Cime Piccole di Rio Bianco, the Little Peaks of the White Torrent, and their traverse is made possible only by the cables and brackets of the vie ferrate – the ‘paths of iron’ – that have been bolted into place. Lucian and I get into our harnesses. My karabiners still carry the silt and mud of the Abyss at Trebiciano, and at the sight of them my mind flies to that dark chamber, some 7,000 vertical feet below us.
‘That’s the Canin,’ says Lucian, pointing to the other side of the valley. A humped, slumped white mountain, with what look like – but cannot be – vast snowfields descending from its whale-backed summit, gleaming in the light and pocked with holes.
‘The Canin is a true karst peak. You can see how the limestone behaves differently. The type we’re on is more friable, sharper. The Canin is more of a bread loaf in outline, more like the moon in texture. You have to imagine it in cross-section, too. It’s honeycombed with natural cave systems. There are caves with their entry points on the slopes of the Canin that descend for almost two vertical kilometres.’
‘A mountain has an inside,’ Nan Shepherd wrote in her great study of the Cairngorms, The Living Mountain, and it took me years to understand what she meant with respect to that granite range, which appears so outwards-facing. Here in the Julians, though, Nan’s proposition seems merely a statement of the obvious. These are hollow mountains, lightless peaks, which everywhere turn in on themselves in the form of valleys and caves.
We are about to begin the traverse of the Cime Piccole when we hear a sustained peal of thunder, rolling in from the north-west.
‘This is not good timing,’ I say to Lucian. ‘We’re attached by metal karabiners to metal cables, with metal ice axes sticking up from our packs, on the exposed ridge of a mountain, with thunder and lightning incoming.’
‘Well, we could wait it out back in the corrie,’ says Lucian, ‘or we could race the storm and hope it slides past us, or doesn’t reach us until we can take shelter in one of the tunnels.’
We race the storm. A two-hour sprint against the thunder. Pinnacle after pinnacle, ticking them off. I remember it in shutter-clicks and sharp shards. Hot rock under the hands. Drops pulling at us. First, second, third tops. Adrenaline, bloodied fingernails, lactic in legs and arms. We are alive in the world, happy to be alive in the world, and the thunderstorm slides slowly past several miles to our north.
The cables of the via ferrata interweave with the conflict infrastructure of the First World War. We balance up trembling timber steps hammered into the rock a hundred winters previously. We use rusted iron ladders to cross notches in the rock. We reach the slopes of the ninth pinnacle and there ahead of us, somehow, is a tunnel mouth – gapingly dark in that sunlit upper world. It has been blasted and hacked fully through the pinnacle, and during the war it must have been one of the safest places in this deadly conflict zone, secure from ordnance, lightning and avalanche.
We step into the tunnel, grateful for the respite it offers from the wind, and the shelter it can provide if the storm swings our way. We walk on into the mountain. The tunnel dips for sixty feet, takes two corner turns, and then we are in darkness so complete we must turn on our head-torches. On again, dropping into a lower level by a rusty ladder, helping each other down with raised and reached hands.
Light rises and we round a corner to find a gun window cut out of the limestone, offering lines of fire across the valley towards the Canin. The rotational iron circle on which the gun was wheeled to east and west is still set into the stone of the emplacement. A recoil space has been cut back into the interior wall. In this confined space, the detonation noise of each shell-fire would have been shattering. The men who worked this gun must have lost their hearing almost immediately.
Light shows again at the turn of the tunnel – a doorway of light now. Having passed through the phases of that hollow peak – light, dark, light, dark, then light again – we are at the end of the ridge, and above a scree-slope that falls away towards a col. I think suddenly of Le Passe-Muraille, the figure in the catacombs who walks through walls.
I run the scree, skidding down to green sloping pastures seamed with paths made by chamois and by people. Patches of old yellow snow lie in the shadows of the peaks. A mile or two away I can see a hut, perched at the point where the ground drops thousands of feet to the valley. It holds the promise of rest, food, company. Thoughts of war tumble away. Clouds pass rapidly over the sun, casting an occulting light over the landscape.
~
The hut is presided over by seven-year-old Theresa and her white cat, Luna. Theresa’s father is the custodian, though he keeps to the back room. Theresa’s mother is nowhere to be seen. Theresa makes the pasta for dinner, and comes out to greet us with flour on her face, carrying Luna under one arm like a rugby ball. She speaks to me in Italian and I to her in English, and neither of us can understand the other but it doesn’t matter at all.
Seeing Theresa, my heart aches for my own children. I haven’t seen them in almost two weeks. The darkness of these beautiful landscapes has leached a little into me, shadowing the edges of sight and spirit. I want to be with them, to make them safe.
The hut is a reliquary of the White War. Its windowsills are lined with the debris of death, picked up by walkers over the years. Shell fragments, bent bayonets, bullets, boot buckles, helmet spikes and chinstraps, and a shell-casing peeled back like a banana skin by the blast. It is a grim museum of slaughter.
There is a small library of books, many of them concerning the war. I sit on a wooden bench, reading about what happened here. There are black-and-white photographs of the fronts that shifted across these mountainsides, the men who fought here. Tunnel after tunnel, portal after portal cut into the stone of the peaks. Men in shadow, looking over to enemy cliffs perforated as the flank of a cruise liner. To get inside the mountains was the only way to shelter from the killing avalanches, from the killing cold, and from the killing enemy shells and bullets. These Alps became weaponized peaks, their topography forcibly reorganized by the imperatives for cover and concealment. Shell-fall alone lowered the height of one mountain by twenty feet. The theatre of the White War extended from the summits of the peaks, through their hollowed-out interiors, down into the caves of the slopes and valleys.
I am reminded again of Eyal Weizman’s study of the landscape architecture of the Israel–Palestine conflict, Hollow Land, and its proposal of ‘elastic geography’, whereby space is to be understood not simply as the backdrop for actions of conflict, ‘but rather the medium that each . . . action seeks to challenge, transform or appropriate’. Weizman mapped the ‘elastic geography’ of the West Bank and Israel: the attempts made by erecting walls and fences hermetically to seal areas of territory, the nonsense made of such sealings by the tunnels that were dug under these barriers by Palestinians in order to smuggle people and weapons, and the arcs described by rockets fired out of Gaza by Hamas militants. He wrote of the reconceptualizations of space undertaken by both sides in the conflict: the way the disputed terrain ran vertically from the militarized airspace far above ground level, all the way down into the competition for control of the water aquifer that lies deep in the limestone, sunk thousands of feet below the West Bank. Weizman’s name for this fluxional space is ‘hollow land’, possessing as it does ‘a complex architectural construction . . . with its separate inbound and outbound levels, security corridors and many checkpoints. Cut apart and enclosed by its many barriers, guttered by underground tunnels, threaded together by overpasses and bombed from its militarized skies, the hollow land emerges as the physical embodiment of the many and varied attempts to partition it.’
Something comparable happened in the Julians during the White War. In this ‘laboratory of the extreme’, new types of warfare were developed, and new transformations of space occurred. Mountains were seen no longer as solid structures, but as honeycombs that could be opened, the interiors of which could be traversed, the walls of which could be walked through. The landscape itself had become actor, agent, combatant. In the Second World War, as Lucian and I saw at the foiba, it would be differently instrumentalized into a means of execution.
Theresa brings Luna over to see me. She drops him onto my lap, then holds him by his ears and kisses him full and hard on the mouth. Luna yowls in protest and digs his claws deep into my thighs. I yowl in protest and dig my fingernails deep into my palm. Theresa wanders off, pleased with the result.
We share the hut with four Triestini. They are regulars, two couples who come up here often from the city to spend time together: ski-mountaineering in the winters, climbing and caving in the summers. They fold us into their conversations, share stories of the mountains. One of the Triestini is a broad-shouldered man, bearish of build. He wears an orange fleece and a blue bandana, and his hair is sweated tight to his scalp. He explains without bravura that he is an extreme caver. I am surprised; he seems quite the wrong shape for such a specialism. I do not convey this thought to him. He gestures over at the Canin.
‘There are some of the deepest caves in Europe from surface to lowest point,’ he says. He comes to sit with us, points out on our map the entrances to the caves.
That night there are lightning flashes far in the distance, illuminating the Canin. Lucian and I go out onto the balcony to watch the show. We can see its pitted limestone plains in the scorch-light. They look like the asteroid-cratered surface of the moon. It is unearthly and beautiful.
We watch the storm, time the gap between each lightning bolt and its accompanying rumble of thunder.
‘You can hear stags bellowing from down in the valley a little later in the year,’ Lucian says after a while. ‘Such a sound – haunting and violent. It drifts up from below and echoes around the cirques.’
Later the storm reaches us, and the rain strikes the tin roof like bullets.
~
We wake to calmness and a miracle.
A cloud-sea fills the landscape below us. The valleys are fjords and we are islanded. As we watch, the cloud surges slowly upwards, roiling higher until I have the illusion that we are sinking – an atoll shuddering down into white water. Green of the pines shows amid eddies of mist and pinnacled peaks; a Chinese scroll painting unrolls before us.
We set off to the west on a thin path that cuts between sheer cliffs above and sheer drops below. We pass in and out of the cloud-sea as the path moves. Where waterfalls drop from the cliffs above, we must crouch and run through them, meltwater clattering on head and neck.
Feline tracks on a snow patch. An ibex glimpsed in the distance. A pair of mating black salamanders in a moist clasp on the path’s white stones, their long toes and fingers pressed ardently against one another. More embrasures, more tunnels, every cliff riddled with them, the whole mountain range a hive, really, a terrible war-hive. We are the bees of the invisible . . .
A flock of choughs dips far below us with pinging cries. Two chamois flee on the gallop, then stop on a boulder, looking back over their shoulders at us. Trenching is still visible in the rocks and soil, grassed over. We walk freely across a side valley, the openness of which once meant death. Coils of barbed wire are sunk in turf and stone.
We drop off the high path and take a contouring line down into the cloud, which gathers us into its white world. At a stand of wild raspberries we stop to eat. The berries are tart in the mouth. On and down from there for hours, and as we fall the sun rises to burn off the cloud.
Early in the afternoon we reach the valley floor, through which flows the young Isonzo. Here, where it passes over the karst of the Canin, its water is ice blue. I want to slip into it and float to the Adriatic. Lucian and I rest on a shingle beach by a deep pool. Trout shadows flip for flies, or hang wavering upstream. What did the mountaineer-mystic W. H. Murray say after being released from years spent in German and Italian POW camps? Find beauty, be still.
A fine mist rises from the water and hangs white above the river, so that the water is clearer than the air. The trees that border the river are lush with moss and lichen. This is not a rainforest but a mist-forest, and through it runs this otherworldly river. I find a flattened, rounded black stone on the shingle, and throw it into the middle of the current. The stone rocks down through the blue water to the riverbed, where it part-buries itself in the white sand.