3

And Empires, Too,
Shall Splash Across These Pages

The ferry pulled into Brindisi on the heel of the boot of Italy, and I stepped off, having had enough of sea travel for a while. Stars still hung in the east, but the harbour was already alive with touts and merchants. Brindisi is better known among travellers as “Brain Disease.” Sorry, but it’s true. There’s a mind-numbingly long wait there between the time ferries pull in and when trains leave to take you up the coast. And there’s nothing to do but sit around the featureless docks trying to safeguard your valuables from hordes of vendors and pickpockets.

When I finally did get on a train, however, it was headed for Rome, the Eternal City. All around me in the cramped compartment people spoke Italian. It’s a beautiful Romance language that dances on the tongue. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s a language for sweeping women off their feet, though it can. Calling it a Romance language means that it’s a remnant of ancient Rome. It’s one of the children of Latin, the tongue of the Roman Empire.

I found myself a little pension not far from the Spanish Steps in Rome. In a square near there I saw a Japanese couple swarmed by Gypsy children. None of the children were older than ten, and the youngest might have been six. They surrounded the couple, a mob of them, tearing at their pockets, at her purse and his camera. An old lady, dressed entirely in black, had been sitting at the fountain, and at this commotion she suddenly stood and began to blow on a whistle. Then, all along the street, shopkeepers came running out of their stores. It must have been a sort of vigilante system they had set up for the neighbourhood. The Gypsy kids bolted, leaving the poor Japanese tourists confused.

Afterward I sat with the old woman, who I thought was very brave. She spoke a bit of English and told me a story I’ll never forget.

“You go to Colosseum?” she asked.

“Yes, of course. I’ll see it this afternoon.”

“You see the cats, yes?”

I had heard of them. The ancient Colosseum of Rome, an immense building that still towers almost jarringly over the centre of the city, crawls with cats.

The old woman pointed at her chest. “I go to feed the cats.”

“You feed them?”

“Sì.” She heaved herself up and sighed. “In the war Mussolini ... you know?” She made a face.

I chuckled. “Yes, Mussolini.”

“A very bad time. No food.” She looked me hard in the eye. “No food, so we eat ... anything. You understand?”

I saw where she was going. During the worst of the war, the people ate wild cats. There was no choice.

“I was little girl,” she said, “but I remember. I cried. And then we, all people of Rome, we made a ... what you call it ... a promise to the cats. We said, you helped us and we never forget, so we give the Colosseum to them. You understand? Forever, we go there and give them food.”

“That’s only fair.”

“Yes, only fair.”

Later I did go to the Colosseum. It’s impressive, though the area below it, the famous Roman Forum, seat of one of the greatest empires that ever existed, is a rather sad two blocks of dirt and rubble. Only with the expert knowledge of a guide can one understand what was once there, since there’s really not a lot to see. Somewhere in these ruins Julius Caesar was murdered. Somewhere here Nero fiddled while Rome burned. Somewhere here the last of the Roman emperors huddled in the dark with the barbarians at the gates.

On a fallen pediment, however, I saw a bit of chiselled writing, something I could read. The letters were familiar, all capitals perhaps, but the script was as plain as the text in front of you now. I was reading a word that was almost two thousand years old. And then, as if to break the spell, a skinny little kitten skittered onto the marble slab. It pawed the air where a bright blue butterfly fluttered by, and I had to smile. The empire had come to this, as all empires are destined to do. Then the kitten flicked a paw at the air and hopped into the shadows between the fallen stones.

I found once in an old book a fragment of a poem from Sappho:

That’s Greek, of course, but look at the passage when it’s put into Latin:

DEDUKE MEN A SELANNA
KAI PLEIADES. MESAI DE
NUKTES. PATA D’ERKHET’ ORA.
EGO DE MONA KATEUDO

If you heard the above spoken aloud in either language, you would never know they were related. The written text, though, especially in uppercase letters, shows an astonishing resemblance. Quite obviously the written Latin borrowed heavily from the Greek.

It’s a pattern. Some languages muscle their way across continents. They travel first on the feet of soldiers, pillaging and plundering. Then, if things go well, they float on the light winds of trade. After that they’re unstoppable.

Languages can be powerful things. The stronger ones quite simply bulldoze the weaker ones, assimilating whatever is useful and discarding the rest. It doesn’t take long. Even the speakers of the weaker language, or their children, anyway, soon start conversing in the more powerful tongue. People are quick to take up any language that will give them greater access to material advancement. It’s survival of the fittest.

Empires are as much about language as they are about conquest. Today the three largest language populations in the world — English, Spanish, and Mandarin — are that way because they’re the shells of past empires that inundated other languages, drowning them with power. Latin isn’t on that list only because it died in a dusty armchair as a happy old man. It had already given the world a host of powerful children that includes Spanish and English.

The above fragment by Sappho, by the way, translates as:

The Pleiads have left the sky, and
The moon has vanished. It’s midnight
The time for meeting is over
And me — I am lying, lonely.

The train to Florence passes through lovely rolling hills. Cypress trees, rising like solidified whirls of smoke, stand in long, solemn rows. This is the legendary landscape of Tuscany, heart of the Italian Renaissance.

In Florence I’d arranged to meet with Lesley, an old friend of mine. She’s a doctor from England and speaks three languages, Italian included. Funny enough, though, this was her first real trip to Italy. She had learned Italian in school and had never been to a place where she could actually use it.

The first thing to know about Florence is that the name is only our clumsy English approximation. Here they call it Firenze, a moniker with fire in its belly. And it’s true. Five hundred years ago Florence burned with a collection of geniuses the world will probably never see again — Galileo, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo. This city was at the heart of an explosion, the shifting of gears between the old world and the new.

It was the Renaissance, of course, literally the rebirth, not so much of the Roman Empire but of the ideals of long-ago Greece. And it was the dialect spoken here in Florence that finally replaced ancient Latin to become the language we now know as Italian. Most of that was due to the work of Dante Alighieri, another Florentine genius.

Never mind that Dante was exiled from Florence. It was he who went on to write The Divine Comedy, one of the great books of history, in the Florentine dialect. He made it plain for all to see that here was a dialect of great delicacy. In the rush and sweep of his almost endless imagination he let loose a language that trips from the tongue like no other.

Walking down the ancient medieval streets, I made up a little game. Lesley and I were off to see Michelangelo’s David, and though I was as usual completely inept at the language, I so badly wanted to try it out that I started making stuff up.

“Fettuccine?” I asked her, pointing at some luxurious old building.

“What?”

“Botticelli,” I continued somewhat more insistently. “Paparazzi.”

“Don’t be such a tosser.”

“Right … sorry.”

Lesley, as I’ve said, really was fluent in Italian and managed to get me safely through numerous transgressions. Once, in fact, she literally opened a door for us with this most beautiful of languages. One afternoon in Florence we went to see the Medici Chapel. The tombs there were sculpted by Michelangelo. I set up my camera on a tripod, but as usual in places like this, people weren’t allowed to use flashes. So I diligently opened the f-stop for a long exposure.

A female security guard accosted me immediately. She waved her finger in my face and made it crystal-clear that I wasn’t allowed to use a tripod. Her hands flew through the air, circling and swooping as she chewed me out. The woman was as ferocious as a pit bull, so I meekly folded my tripod and limped off to lick my wounds. Lesley and I gazed at the marbles for a while, then I reminded her of something I’d read in my guidebook. There are sketches by Michelangelo here, it said. Ask to see them.

Well, this place wasn’t an art gallery. It was a chapel filled with tombs, and I couldn’t see anything resembling sketches. Lesley glanced around. There was no one else there except the pit bull security guard, now standing in the corner and eyeing us suspiciously.

“Shall I ask her then?” Lesley questioned.

“I guess so.”

She went over and spoke Italian to the pit bull. Instantly, the guard erupted, her hands gesturing madly. Lesley translated the barrage for me. “It’s impossible,” she was saying. “You must obtain permission from the front desk in writing. It takes six months to be approved.”

Then the woman looked at us, and her attitude melted a bit. We had been unfailingly polite to her as only the British and Canadians can be, so she recanted. Glancing both ways as if to make sure the coast was clear, she put a finger to her lips and swore us to silence. Then she motioned us to follow her down a hallway off to the side. I think now that it was Lesley’s Italian that tipped the scales. Perhaps the pit bull felt badly about verbally mauling us twice. So we followed her along the narrow passageway, and in the shadows she stopped and reached down to a latch on the floor. It was a trap door. She opened it and pointed. “Vai la giu,” she said. “Go down there.” A ladder poked up out of the opening, and Lesley and I exchanged looks.

We climbed into something like a cellar, a whitewashed space maybe the size of a small bedroom. The woman didn’t accompany us down the ladder, and as our eyes gradually adjusted, I saw marks all over the walls. I peered more closely. Here there was a delicately rendered hand slightly turned, there a half-finished profile — a bearded god-like figure. They were drawings that were unmistakably the work of a master. The master. Here were the sketches of Michelangelo. He had stood in this little room and had left his mark on these walls.

It’s something we all tend to do, though few of us can do it like Michelangelo. Still, we all like to mark where we’ve been. We all want to say simply, “I was here.”

Afterward, I tried to find prints of these drawings, photos in books, postcards, anything, but I’ve never seen them reproduced anywhere. They were, it seems, done while Michelangelo was in hiding. He sheltered here during a siege of the city in 1530. The troops of Charles V, the Holy Roman emperor, had surrounded Florence and were shelling it with cannons. Michelangelo stayed in this cellar for a month, doodling on the walls with charcoal. They were among the last drawings he ever did. Not long after the siege he fled to Rome and lived out the last years of his life there, never again to return to his beloved Firenze.

The drawings were only discovered again in 1975. The little cellar is still closed to the public and all but a handful of restoration scientists and historians. But somehow we were allowed in. The doors were unlocked for us, and we were allowed a glimpse of the sublime sketches of a frail and frightened genius.

We all make our marks in various ways. Humans are experts at creating and manipulating marks or symbols. Language is just one of these systems of symbols. We also use mathematics and spatial orientation. Humans can think in music or even with kinesthetic intelligence, a sort of muscle memory that might be used to choreograph a ballet or map a strategy for winning a football game. All of these are called semiotic systems, semiotics being the study of how humans represent things, how we assign symbols as stand-ins for much more complex ideas.

Humans are very good at symbols, much better than gorillas, for example. The most famous gorilla to use symbols was named Koko, who was taught to recognize and employ more than a thousand, even becoming proficient enough to name a kitten she had acquired for a pet. Koko named it All Ball, perhaps referring to the fact that the cat was an excellent playmate. But even if you buy the supposition that Koko truly understood what she was doing, with a thousand symbols she was working at about the level of a three-year-old human child.

The point is that humans tend to think in a variety of semiotic systems, representing things with symbols — topographical lines on a map, a percentage sign, holding up our middle finger at the guy who cuts us off in traffic — but the most powerful, most efficient, most versatile of these semiotic systems is undoubtedly language.

For one thing languages constantly change. They always evolve to meet our needs. Anyone can see the difference between Shakespearean English and our modern version. We’ve lost thou and thee, but that’s four hundred years of change and easy to see.

The fact is that no matter what the various protectors of grammar say, languages relentlessly mutate. They borrow words and ideas from other languages. They change their pronunciation, and over time they even lose bits and pieces of their grammar. I suspect, for instance, that the adverb suffix ly will disappear from English in another fifty years. As shocking as it might appear to English teachers, sentences like “I tried to get there quick” will become perfectly grammatical.

Yes, languages are as organic as we are. And so Latin got old and eventually fossilized. It remains with us in a jumble of scientific phylums, though it rarely escapes the bonds of the written page any longer. The spoken variations, however, continue to grow and move and spring up into new dialects. Latin has already spawned not only Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian, but also Catalan, Provençal, and even far-off Romanian.

Language can get very complicated. The mythical lines between actual tongues and their dialects become blurry and confused. In Italy, for example, so many dialects came out of Latin that it wasn’t until 1979 that what we commonly refer to as Italian, the Tuscan dialect, became the one spoken at home by more than 50 percent of all Italians. And, like many other countries, there are still pockets of other dialects spoken across Italy, including Sicilian, Umbrian, and Corsican.

That’s how the Tower of Babel works. New dialects continually emerge from a mother tongue, usually the language of an empire. They blossom into dozens of other tongues, often leaving the host language a mere museum piece. They form families with all manner of odd uncles and drunken cousins.

Perhaps this is strange to us in North America where you can travel for hundreds and even thousands of kilometres without hearing any major differences in speech patterns. But we are the anomaly. That situation exists nowhere else in the world.

I was attacked in northern Spain by a pack of wild dogs. Well, okay, it was only two dogs, but one of them was a German shepherd and the other was a Rottweiler. They were big dogs, and the German shepherd had three legs. It was a real mean son of a bitch, so in my mind I was definitely assaulted by a pack of dogs. They ripped and tore at me, but why? Because I was on their turf.

I was staying in San Sebastian, a small city on the northern coast of Spain. It’s set in a beautiful bay on the Atlantic Ocean. The entrance to the bay is guarded by two small mountains, and on one of them a statue of Jesus Christ glowers over the city.

I had come to San Sebastian quite by chance during yet another major festival — Semana Grande, “The Big Week.” It’s really an enormous drunk. Deep into the night I wound through the ancient streets sloppily cavorting from tapas bar to tapas bar. It was a lot of fun.

After a few sweet nights of this, my liver was beginning to shut down, and I needed to get away from the mayhem. So I moved to a quiet hostel high in the mountains behind the city. The views over the bay were spectacular, and all around there was a deep and tranquil forest.

One evening my responsibility was to get the wine for dinner, which meant a trip to the village at the foot of the mountain. I set off, half walking, half jogging along a narrow path that wound through the trees. And that was when it happened. About halfway down, the dogs came out of the trees ahead of me, snarling and growling. I was jogging at this point, and I thought I could loop around them. That was a mistake.

I felt their teeth rip into my legs, and I realize now that if I had tripped and fallen it might have been all over for me. For some reason, though, I halted, turned, and yelled at them, even as they were tearing at my legs like piranhas. It was only a wordless howl of protest, but to my surprise the dogs backed off a step or two. My jeans were shredded, and I could feel warm blood dripping down my left leg. The German shepherd with three legs continued to snarl and bark, white flecks of saliva spraying from its mouth. The Rottweiler, though, had edged farther back. It was barking at me, too, but without much enthusiasm.

I continued down to the village with a bloodied leg and torn jeans. I didn’t resume my mission out of a sense of responsibility. It was more like I really didn’t know what else to do. When I returned to the hostel, everyone gathered around in concern. I called up Lesley, who was now back in England, and according to her instructions, we cleaned the wound, though I’ve still got a nasty scar there. I’m kind of proud of it. That was the leg the German shepherd got hold of. On the other, the pant leg was ripped, but the Rottweiler didn’t break the skin. I’ll remember that in future: four legs good, three legs bad.

Of course, I had no right to charge out of the trees at the dogs. That was their place, their turf, their empire. I should have understood immediately, since there’s no animal more territorial, more vicious, or more self-possessed than humans. We mark our turf emphatically, we raise our legs and piss around our borders, and we do it with language. Our accents and inflections, and the way we write, speak, and understand, indelibly mark us and the territory to which we belong.

In San Sebastian there was a large poster on the wall outside the station. It read in English: TOURISTS, YOU ARE NOT IN SPAIN. YOU ARE IN BASQUE COUNTRY.

San Sebastian is all about turf and language. This is Basque country — a fiercely separatist region. In fact, no one here would even call the city San Sebastian. In Basque it’s called Donostia.

The Basques are a curiosity. They speak a language called Euskara in their own tongue. It’s an isolate language, meaning that it’s completely unrelated to any other language on the planet. They’re very rare these isolates. There are only a handful of them on Earth, and the Basques take great pride in the fact that their language is one of them.

Euskara, for the most part, is a cacophony of k’s, r’s, and x’s. Here, for example, is a random sentence from a pamphlet I picked up: “Zuraren askotariko erabilerak giro bat sortu dugu orduko bizimoduaren kutsua emateko.” Try saying that three times fast.

The Basques believe they were actually the first inhabitants of Europe. They have a saying: “Before rocks were rocks, before God was God … the Basques were Basques.”

A couple of hundred kilometres north of Donostia are the famous prehistoric caves of Lascaux whose rock walls dance with red ochre bisons and antelopes. The paintings date back almost fifteen thousand years, and to some degree they’re not much different from Michelangelo’s marks in that little cellar in Florence. The prehistoric people were marking territory, calling their mountainous world their own. The Basques believe the caves were painted by their direct ancestors, and there’s a good possibility they’re right.

A series of genetic tests seem to indicate that the Basques are the only pre-Neolithic population left in Europe, which means they might well be the first people to have arrived there. Undoubtedly, Euskara derives from something very ancient, something much older than Spanish or even Latin, older even than Indo-European. At the very least it’s distinctly different. There are still about eight hundred thousand people fluent in Euskara and another two million who speak at least a little of it. Even though the language has been surrounded by Spanish for a thousand years, even though it was banned completely under the fascist dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, it has somehow managed to survive.

The Basques have been pushed into corners of Spain and France where the Pyrenees protect them. But they’ve been able to hold on to that bit of turf. They are and always will be something apart, something different, something that came before.

When I was studying linguistics at university, there was one name that kept popping up — Noam Chomsky. In 1957 he produced a work called Syntactic Structures, and my field of study has never been the same.

Chomsky claimed that our brains are hardwired to produce language. We all have certain built-in mechanisms, sort of behind-the-scenes cogs and wheels that spin out our languages. The hardware in the brain is the same for all of us. It’s only the software, or “wetware,” that differs from language to language. What that means is that the grammars of all languages are simply variations on a basic underlying foundation. With a bit of imagination you can take that to mean there really is only one language and that everything you hear around the world, all six thousand languages and tens of thousands of dialects, are simply variations of a fixed template.

It’s something like taking a mathematical formula, say (a + b)², and imagining it as a grammatical sentence in one language. In another language the grammatical structure might look like a² + 2ab + b². But, if you remember high-school mathematics, you realize that it’s actually the same formula. It’s just been factored in a different way, or as Chomsky would say, the deep structure is the same.

I’ve never really liked this sort of mathematical model, though, this computer metaphor that seems so popular in academic circles. It’s too cold, too sterile. It’s like defining water as a molecule wherein two hydrogen atoms are bonded with an oxygen atom. That’s all quite accurate, but it tells you nothing about the shimmering, splashing, gurgling properties of water.

In my own graduate work in linguistics I’d been taught how to map out noun phrases. I’d been educated to decipher the rules by which a transitive verb might be able to move to a different part of the sentence. We spent great gobs of time looking at different grammar.

Blah, blah, blah, I thought. What about the toot and whistle of all the tongues of the Earth? What about the way language snaps and sparkles? What about poetry? What about philosophy?

What about the way a language makes you feel? What about the way it makes you think? What about the way it makes … you?

I took the long train down into Spain proper to Madrid, the capital. On the train I met Mark from South Africa. He had been a tour guide leader for three years all over Spain.

“Have you ever been to a real bullfight?” he asked after we arrived in Madrid. He had taken it upon himself to show me Spanish culture and had quickly pointed out the bullfight posters in the train station. I admit I was intrigued, though slightly alarmed. I didn’t want to see any animals killed for sport.

“You can’t understand Spain,” Mark said, “until you’ve seen a bullfight.”

“But —”

“There’s a famous young matador appearing tonight. We should go.”

And so we did, but it was sickening.

“What did you think of that?” Mark asked after the first bull was killed.

“It’s awful.” I’m sure my face was pale.

“You eat meat, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” I said, unsure where he was going with this conversation.

“Well, the cows you eat are penned up and force-fed. They live a miserable life. These toros —” he swept his hand over the arena “— they live their whole lives on the open range.”

“And then they die a horrible death.”

“No,” he said. “That’s exactly where you’re wrong. They die a noble death. They die fighting.”

“A death all the same,” I argued.

“Have you read Hemingway?”

“Yeah, well … some of his stuff.”

“Then you must read Death in the Afternoon if you want to understand.”

And I did want to understand. For hundreds of years the Spanish have been flocking to see this spectacle. It’s as deeply ingrained in their culture as Catholicism. So why was it, to me, a sickening and disgusting affair?

One of the important features to know about a bullfight is that in Spain every bull is killed one way or another, which doesn’t seem fair. They stick things in the back of the bull, for God’s sake. Eventually, they slide a razor-sharp sword into the bull’s neck. Properly done, the sword severs the aorta, and the bull dies instantly. That almost never happens, however. The sword bounces off ribs and slides between organs. It usually takes a minute or two for the beast’s knees to buckle. Blood spews out of the bull’s mouth, and then when the animal finally buckles, the matador takes something resembling an ice pick and slams it into the creature’s forehead. The bull’s legs quiver once and then the animal is still. The carcass is dragged away after that, and though I’m told the meat is divided up and eaten, I was still shocked at the brutality of everything.

Mark shook his head sadly. “You don’t understand. Perhaps foreigners never do.” He seemed to have forgotten that he was a foreigner, too. “All things die,” he continued. “Even you’ll die one day. The whole thing’s a metaphor.”

Another bull was entering the ring.

“It’s not unusual for a matador to be gored and horribly wounded even in this day and age.” Mark looked hard at me. “I can see that this is what you’re hoping for. You’re cheering for the bull now, but you’re wrong. All things must die. That’s not open for debate. The real question is how we live. Do we live bravely? With courage?” He paused and took a deep, self-satisfied breath. “The matador lives and dies bravely, and so does the bull. It’s all about pundonor.”

“What?”

“Pundonor. In Spanish it means honour, but it’s something more than just honour. It’s also courage, self-respect, and pride all in one word. Pundonor to a Spaniard is as ‘real as water, wine, or olive oil.’” Mark was quoting Ernest Hemingway, and Papa was right. This was the key to understanding it all.

Later I did have a look at Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon. The book isn’t a novel. It’s an extended essay on the bullfight for which Hemingway was an aficionado. “Bullfighting,” he said, “is the only art in which the artist is in danger of death.” The people still talk of the great matadors of the past. They talk of their bravery, their moves, their gory deaths.

Every move has a name and a history, Mark explained as we watched. When the matador swept his cape over the back of the bull, several thousand voices shouted “¡Ole!”

“You see,” Mark said, “that was a veronica.”

“A veronica?”

“Yes. Listen, are you Catholic?”

“No.”

“Well, then when Christ carried his cross from the trial to the place of his crucifixion, all the little events that happened to him were detailed. They’re called the Stations of the Cross.”

I remembered that, of course, from the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem. I recalled the pilgrims weeping and carrying their rented crosses across the cobblestones.

“The sixth station,” Mark said, “is where a woman, Veronica, came out of the crowd to mop Christ’s forehead.”

Okay, I was starting to get it. The cape of the matador became the cloth of Veronica wiping the brow of the condemned prisoner. She mopped the brow of the one who was about to die. An interesting analogy. So there was a lot more to this than met a tourist’s eyes.

It was, I realized, another one of those symbolic systems, as full and as subtle as any other. Once you understood what the symbols stood for, once you understood that it was a metaphor, well … you were almost there.

But I still didn’t get it.

Down even farther into Spain, into Andalusia, I came to Seville and Granada, the ancient Moorish capitals. The Moors were Muslims who had come up from Africa in the ninth century. This Moorish paradise lasted for more than five hundred years. It was a time of great scientific advance, an era of religious tolerance and true enlightenment.

In1469 Ferdinand, king of Aragon, married Isabella, queen of Castile. With their combined military might they expelled the Moors from Spain in what was to be the final battle ever fought by armoured knights on horseback. Granada was the last of the Moorish strongholds to tumble. The palace fell in 1492, the same year Christopher Columbus sailed to America for Ferdinand and Isabella, a strange but true convergence of history. It was the end of one world and the beginning of the next, a massive sea change in human history. For a while Spain would become the most powerful nation on the planet.

Also in 1492 a linguist named Antonio de Nebrija put together the first book of Spanish grammar. When he presented it to Queen Isabella, she was confused. “What is this for?” she asked.

“Your Majesty,” he replied. “Language is the perfect tool for building empires.”

In the Alcázar palace in Seville a wide tapestry hangs on a wall. It shows the first Native brought back by Columbus from the New World. He has fallen to his knees in the massive cathedral of Seville, humbled before the altar. To me, though, he isn’t prostrate before the power of the Catholic Church; he’s collapsed in the face of the absurdity of everything. From the distant thatch huts of the Caribbean Sea to a stone edifice as big as a mountain was more than his fragile heart could believe.

In Granada I lined up to see the Alhambra, the fabled Moorish palace. In its heyday it was a place of sunlit rooms and gardens, a magnificent edifice that shamed the grim Dark Age castles of the Europeans.

The queue snaked around a garden. Even early in the morning the line was hundreds of metres long. For two hours I stood there by myself. Everyone around me was speaking Spanish, so I sort of withdrew into myself. After an interminable time, the young man behind me, who had been speaking Spanish to his girlfriend, suddenly said in perfect English, “Listen, if you want to take a break, we can hold your place.”

I can’t begin to tell you how surprised I was. I went to the washroom, and when I returned, we started talking. His name was Carlos, and he had studied for a year in the United States. Carlos, I’d noticed earlier, was from the New World. Judging by the features of his face, it was plain he had an indigenous ancestry. As it turned out, Carlos was from Colombia.

Spain’s empire once covered half the world. It’s gone now, but the language remains so that even in the deepest jungles, even in the most inaccessible mountains of South America, the indigenous peoples speak the tongue of a faraway land.

“Colombia,” Carlos said, “is a beautiful country, but no one thinks of it that way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, what do you think of Colombia?”

The answer was plain. “Cocaine, drug lords, guerrillas … lots of bad stuff.”

“That’s right. I’m an economics student, but everywhere I go, as soon as I pull out my passport …” He paused for a moment, then continued. “Flying here, I was held at the airport in Madrid for ten hours.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he said, “I’m a rock climber. I’m climbing here in the north and also in France. There’s some of the best climbing in the world in both places — a Mecca for climbers. Well, you know, climbers use a kind of talcum powder for their hands. You have to keep them dry.” An impish grin appeared on his face. “Whenever I show my passport, they take me aside and tear my bags apart. In one bag they found my talcum powder and, of course, they thought …”

He laughed and so did I. We hooted until the other people in the line regarded us strangely.

“They had to get it tested, they told me,” Carlos said between wheezes. “I tried to explain things to them, but —” He exploded in laughter again. “Dumb fucks! They really pissed me off.” Old Carlos had learned his English well.

He told me, too, that he was cutting his trip short. The new government in Colombia had called for an all-out war against the guerrillas. The last government had promoted a policy of appeasement, a leave-us-alone-and-we’ll-leave-you-alone sort of thinking. That didn’t work. Carlos told me he felt he should be home when things started happening.

“It’s sad,” he said. “Colombia really is a beautiful country. For example, have you ever heard of the pink dolphins?”

“No.”

“Well, they live in the tributaries of the Amazon. They’re the only freshwater dolphins in the world. They’re pink and quite rare. In Colombia we have a legend about them. The male of the species can change into a human form at will. Often they’ll come into the towns when they know there’s going to be a big party. They’re very handsome, it’s said, and so they seduce young girls and sleep with them. Always, though, they wear hats to hide the blowholes high on their foreheads. It’s the only way to know they’re not human.”

It was then that I realized Carlos was wearing a ball cap. I pointed at it. “So what’s under your hat, Carlos?”

When I got as far south in Spain as I could go, I signed up for a sailing course. Although I was still in Europe, I was no longer in Spain. I was in Gibraltar, a very odd place and the remnant of yet another great empire.

Like Spain before it, Britain cast its net over the world, and Gibraltar was one of its catches. The colony is as English as Trafalgar Square. You can buy fish and chips there and pay for it in British pounds. If you walk a thousand steps to your right, however, you find yourself back in Spain.

Very odd. And, of course, rearing above everything is the Rock. It’s quite a slab of stone, knifing out of the dark ocean. Across the straits a similar mountain looms out of the water near Africa. Together they’re called the Pillars of Hercules, the doorway to the Mediterranean.

If you control this point, you dominate the Mediterranean. And that’s why Gibraltar is still British. Up on the Rock, kilometres and kilometres of secret tunnels bore into the cliffs. No one knows quite what’s in there, but I walked up and discovered razor wire marked with forbidding signs from the Ministry of Defence.

I had come here for sailing lessons. During the first days, we went into the harbour to sail. I learned to tie the required knots and crank on the necessary winches. Phil was the skipper of our ship. He had lived in Gibraltar all his life and was quite certain the tunnels above us were filled with British military surveillance technology — stuff beyond the wildest dreams of the civilian world. He spoke in hushed tones with, oddly, a bit of a lisp, as well. Perhaps it was something in the air.

Anyway, Gibraltar remains resolutely British. Unlike Hong Kong, the United Kingdom will never let it go. It won it fair and square, and anyone who says otherwise can step right up for a very proper thrashing.

The end of the sailing lesson was to be a crossing from Gibraltar to Africa. We would sail under our own power, but what I didn’t realize is that we would be heading into a war zone. Just as I got there, a small war broke out. The previous week Morocco had invaded tiny Isla del Perejil, quite literally Parsley Island.

It was the first invasion of European soil since the Second World War — a turf battle, to be sure. Territory was being marked again. I admit, though, I’m using the words war and battle pretty loosely. About a dozen poorly armed Moroccan frontier guards landed on the island, equipped with a radio, two flags, and a couple of tents. No one was there to see them raise the flag except some lizards, bugs, and possibly a very confused goat.

Spain, however, was incensed. The island historically belonged to it. It was protected by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, so the Spanish immediately sent a warship to straighten things out.

Phil, our sailing instructor, laughed off the danger. Despite the fact that we would be sailing right by Isla del Perejil, he insisted the war had nothing to do with us.

Tell that to a bullet.

I noticed that Phil had a strange accent. His th sound was always an f. “Fank you,” he’d say politely when I handed him one of the charts. “I fink today I’ll get you to raise the sails by yourself.”

We spent a few days tacking and gybing in Gibraltar’s harbour beneath the massive Rock. From the top of Gibraltar, on a clear day, Mount Acha on the coast of Africa is visible. Also up on the Rock are the famous Barbary apes, the only primates in Europe. Actually, they were brought over by British soldiers a couple of centuries ago. The troops kept the monkeys as pets not long before the Battle of Trafalgar, and a number of the apes went wild, perhaps when their owners didn’t return from the battle. When I was on Gibraltar, they howled over the mountaintop, snapped at tourists’ fingers, defecated on cars, and stole my goddamn water bottle!

At the other end of the Rock is St. Michael’s Cave. It was here in 1855 that a strange thick-furrowed skull was unearthed. Two years later a similar skull was uncovered in a place called Neanderthal, Germany. The Neanderthal race was once as common on this planet as we are now. For some reason, though, they all disappeared about thirty thousand years ago.

Here were a people even older than the Basques, so old they weren’t even quite human. It’s not known, for example, if Neanderthals spoke any language. They had skulls and jaws significantly different from ours, but the existence of vocal cords can neither be proven nor disproven. Neanderthals did have a small hyoid bone, a technical necessity for having a larynx, and they possessed a gene, FOXP2, which is associated with human language. However, this gene is also found in songbirds so that it’s difficult to say what sort of communication systems Neanderthals employed.

In fact, the lack of language might be one of the central reasons Neanderthals died out and we’re still around. Somehow we found the ability to communicate abstract ideas to one another, to strategize and plan for the future. It is this aptitude that most surely marked the emergence and dominance of Cro-Magnon Man … us. We developed the most complicated and intricate communication system yet seen and soon spread across the Earth, usurping Neanderthals, tackling all environments, and conquering even the vast seas that lay before us.

On the third day Phil announced we would attempt the crossing to Morocco, especially since a good wind was blowing. I was excited, despite the fact that I barely knew what I was doing. The straits we’d be crossing marked the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea. For Phoenicians who sailed through here three thousand years earlier it was the end of the world. For ancient Greeks it was a portal into the great unknown. Columbus tested his ships here, and so did Magellan. All of these explorers sailed through these fabled gates into the great unmapped Atlantic.

We had just made it out of the harbour when Phil glanced up at the sky. “I fink we better get our harnesses on.”

I frowned. “Harnesses?”

“Yeah, you’re going to need them.”

He wasn’t kidding. Out in the straits the wind whipped up to thirty-eight knots. All of a sudden we were skudding across the waves almost out of control. I pulled on the necessary ropes and winched when I could, though truthfully most of the time I held on to the railing for dear life while the roiling waves crashed over me. Phil stood in front of me, manning the wheel, laughing maniacally into the wind.

Halfway over to Africa, Phil pointed at the whitecaps as a pair of dolphins shot out of a cresting wave. They were like torpedoes, and soon a pod of them wove in and out of our wake. It was a magical moment.

“Carlos,” I called, “is that you out there?”

After a few hours, the waters calmed a bit and the sandy red hills of Morocco appeared in the distance. Phil looked at his watch and began to yip. “We’ve made a record crossing. That’s the fastest one I’ve ever done.”

“Great, Phil, that’s just great,” I said.

Jutting from the shoreline was the little rock tumble of Isla del Perejil. I didn’t see any goats, but the Moroccan flag was gone. The War of Parsley Island was finished, and Europe, apparently, had come through victorious again. The great continent of empires remained unscathed.