Findings Page 2

  Alan, an Englishman in Historic Scotland tartan trousers, led me into a little shop to issue a ticket. The shop was housed in an old water mill, some distance from the tomb, and sold guidebooks and fridge magnets and tea towels. From the window you could see over the main road to the tomb.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a ticket so you can come back tomorrow, if you like, but I can’t give you one for the actual solstice, Saturday. We start selling them at two-thirty on the actual solstice. It’s first come, first served.’

  ‘How many people come?’

  ‘Well, we can accommodate 25, at a pinch.’

  But today there was only myself.

  The young guide, Rob, was waiting outside. A workman’s van hurtled past, then we crossed the road, entered through a wicket gate and followed a path across the field. We were walking toward the tomb by an indirect route that respected the wide ditch around the site. Sheep were grazing the field, and a heron was standing with its aristocratic back to us. There was a breeze, and the shivery call of a curlew descending. On all sides there are low hills, holding the plain between them. To the south, the skyline is dominated by two much bigger, more distant hills, a peak and a plateau. Though you wouldn’t know it from here, they belong to another island, to Hoy. Above these dark hills, in horizontal bars, were the offending clouds.

  You enter into the inner chamber of the tomb by a low passageway more than 25 feet long. It’s more of a journey than a gateway. You don’t have to crawl on hands and knees, but neither can you walk upright. The stone roof bears down on your spine; a single enormous slab of stone forms the wall you brush with your left shoulder. You must walk in that stooped position just a moment too long, so when you’re admitted to the cairn two sensations come at once: you’re glad to stand, and the other is a sudden appreciation of stone. You are admitted into a solemn place which is not a heart at all, or even a womb, but a cranium.

  You are standing in a high, dim stone vault. There is a thick soundlessness, like a recording studio, or a strongroom. A moment ago, you were in the middle of a field, with the wind and curlews calling. That world has been taken away, and the world you have entered into is not like a cave, but a place of artifice, of skill. Yes, that’s it, what you notice when you stand and look around is cool, dry, applied skill. Across five thousand years you can still feel their self-assurance.

  The walls are of red sandstone, dressed into long rectangles, with a tall sentry-like buttress in each corner to support the corbelled roof. The passage to the outside world is at the base of one wall. Set waist-high into the other three are square openings into cells which disappear into the thickness of the walls. That’s where they laid the dead, once the bones had been cleaned of flesh by weather and birds. The stone blocks which would once have sealed these graves lie on the gravel floor. And the point is, the ancients who built this tomb orientated it precisely: the long passageway faces exactly the setting midwinter sun. Consequently, for the few days around the winter solstice a beam of the setting sun shines along the passage, and onto the tomb’s back wall. In recent years, people have crept along the passageway at midwinter to witness this, the complicit kiss. Some, apparently, find it overwhelming.

  We crossed the field. The heron took to the air. I dawdled behind. My guide, the young Rob, was waiting at the entrance, which is just a low square opening at the bottom of the mound. I glanced back at the outside world, the road, the clouded sky over Hoy’s hills, which did not look promising; then we crept inside and for a long minute walked doubled over, until Rob stood and I followed.

  Inside was bright as a tube train, and the effect was brutal. I’d expected not utter darkness, but perhaps a wombish-red. Rob was carrying a torch but this light revealed every crack, every joint and fissure in the ancient stonework. At once a man’s voice said, ‘Sorry, I’ll switch it off,’ but the moment was lost and, anyway, I’d been forewarned. As he sold me the ticket, Alan had told me that surveyors were inside the cairn, with all their equipment. ‘A bit of a problem’, was how he’d put it. And here they were. We entered the tomb and, in that fierce white light, it was like that moment which can occur in midlife, when you look at your mother and realise with a shock that she is old.

  The surveyers, commissioned by Historic Scotland, were doing a project that involved laser-scanning, photogrammetry, and pulse-radar inspection. They were working inside the tomb, and had been for days. A huge implement, I couldn’t tell if it was a torch or a camera, lay on a schoolroom chair. There was a telephone in one of the grave-cells. There were two surveyors. One was folded, foetus-like, into the little cell in the back wall. I could see only his legs. He grunted as he shifted position.

  ‘Strange place to spend your working day,’ I remarked.

  ‘You’re not wrong,’ he replied, sourly.

  His older colleague seemed glad for a break. He stood, a portly man in a black tracksuit and fleece jacket, and stretched his back. Somehow he dimmed the light and the tomb settled back into restful gloom. The outside world was a square at the far end of the long passageway. There would be no sunset.

  ‘Too bad,’ the surveyor said. ‘Oh, well.’

  Rob, hunched in his woolly hat, drew breath and raised his torch as though to begin the guided tour, but he paused.

  ‘Been here before?’ he asked me.

  ‘Several times.’

  He said, ‘We’re on the Web now, y’know,’ and gestured with the torch to a camera mounted on the Neolithic wall. ‘Live. Don’t go picking your nose.’

  ‘Watch your eyes!’ said the voice from the grave-chamber, then came a detonating flash.

  The tomb had fallen into disuse. Four thousand winters passed, four thousand solstices. Then a party of Vikings arrived en route to the crusades. They broke into the tomb to take refuge from a storm, and probably cleared out what they found inside: bones, backfill. The Vikings passed the tedious hour by hatching names and witticisms on the stones – Maes Howe contains the best collection of Runic inscriptions outwith Iceland. ‘Crusaders broke into this howe,’ they say. ‘Many a woman has walked stooping in here.’

  The Vikings went away, leaving many messages, but Maes Howe was again half-forgotten, a fairy place, a strange mound on a heath. Generations lived and died. We invented electric light, the internal combustion engine, we exploited oilfields, developed telephones and TVs, to dispel the winter dark – and now at solstice we come, as no one has done for nigh on 5000 years, to witness a little beam of sunlight creeping through the darkness onto a stone wall.

  The surveyors had been beset by technical problems. They were behind schedule and fed up. The younger man unfolded himself from the grave-cell, and I asked him what it was he was doing. ‘Just stereo photography,’ he said. ‘Pass me that light meter, would you?’ He folded himself back into the grave.

  Stereo photography works on the same principle as our own eyes and, like our eyes, gives us a 3D image. With the right computer equipment, they would generate a complete 3D image of the interior of the tomb, which you could look at on a screen. It would be an accurate, absolutely precise record of what it’s like in there. The work had been commissioned because Historic Scotland, who are charged with care of the monument, are anxious to know if the building is moving. There are tiny fissures and cracks in the stonework – that brash light revealed them all. They might have happened in time out of mind, when the building was new. On the other hand, the tiny cracks might be more recent, which would be worrying. The surveyors would make their images, and then in eighteen months come back and do it all again, and then, by comparing the two results, they would discern the slightest difference, the slightest shift in the structure. Rob was explaining it to me. ‘There’s other problems too,’ he said. ‘Look.’ He pointed out a green smear on a high stone. ‘Algae.’

  Many visitors come crawling along the entrance tunnel to marvel at the tomb, and they breathe. The building wasn’t designed to be breathed in and lit. It was designed to be dead in,
and dark. Breath and light mean algae, and algae is damaging. A tiny humidity recorder had been installed to monitor the levels of moisture within the tomb.

  Further, there was the roof above our heads. It was not original, but the work of enthusiastic Victorian archaeologists. They had awakened Maes Howe out of a long sleep, by entering through its roof, as you might crack a boiled egg. Though they had repaired their damage, it was not to the Neolithic standard, and a watchful eye was being kept on it. And there was more. When it was constructed, the tomb had been clad in waterproof clay before being covered in a thick layer of earth and turf – the prehistoric builders knew what they were doing – but the waterproofing had since been punctured. These damages, too, could admit insidious, creeping moisture. Though it was known the waterproofing had been damaged, no one could tell exactly where. Rather than scalp all the earth from the monument to investigate, they were doing it the modern way: a pulse-radar survey. And then there were the carvings. Broaches in the layer of waterproof clay might admit not only damp, but tiny scouring particles of the clay itself. The worry was that, as these particles washed slowly into the interior and migrated down the stonework, they may slowly be wearing away the carvings there. Rob lit with his torch Maes Howe’s famous little lion, which is a delicate carving about the size of your fist, etched on a tall slab.

  That was Viking work, but the tomb also contains Neolithic carvings: strange, nervy conjoined triangle and diamond shapes. As Rob shone his torch on the little lion, instinctively I lifted my hand to touch it, to make a gesture of connection.

  ‘Please don’t,’ he said.

  That’s why we are minded by a guide. Too many wandering, sweaty fingers would soon wear the carvings away.

  ‘Well,’ Rob said. ‘We don’t know for sure if they are wearing away. That’s what these surveyors are here to find out. Laser-scanning. If they made a laser scan of each surface, and then repeat it in eighteen months, they’d be able to tell, because the lasers can measure loss of thousandth of a millimetre…’

  Rob shoved his torch in his pocket. ‘You see it’s a World Heritage Site now,’ he said. ‘You can’t mess with a World Heritage Site. But it’s not doing too badly. I mean, how many other five-thousand-year-old buildings do you know?’

  ‘Last longer than a Wimpey house,’ said a voice from the cell at the back.

  ‘So that’s why they’re taking all these measurements. And who’ll pay for it? The taxpayer. That’s who. The taxpayer.’

  The younger man worked on, but the elder of the surveyors joined Rob and me, and in the sombre hush of the tomb we talked. Polite strangers, we stood with our hands on our hips, regarding this consummate Neolithic stonework, this ancient house of the dead, this metaphor, and talked about property prices. I can’t remember if we spoke in low voices, as you would in a sacred place. I think we must have, because you could sense the stern weight of stone and earth overhead.

  Nothing’s certain in this life but death and taxes. I’d been thwarted last night, leaning on the deck-rail, in my hope of sailing into real northern dark, and disappointed again this short midwinter day that no beam of sunlight would enter the tomb. But something interesting was happening here. It occured to me, sometime during our brief conversation, that I would never again get so close to real Neolithic ancestors. Had this scene not happened before, thousands of years ago? Had not skilled workmen stood within this very tomb at the end of a working day, and taken a moment to survey their handiwork? Real people, flesh on their bones, tools in their hands, words on their lips in some language now utterly lost? I glanced behind me. The young surveyor was sitting hunched in the cell, his knees bent up. He sighed, and passed his weary hand over his face.

  We spoke about the recent fire in Edinburgh, which had destroyed some buildings in the Old Town, and wondered if they could be rebuilt. Could we ever afford to rebuild them? The surveyor, as befitted his profession, asked if anyone actually knew what they looked like. Had they photographs? Drawings? Measurements? I remarked that they’d rebuilt parts of bombed-out Warsaw using the paintings of Canaletto’s nephew, Bernardo Bellotto.

  ‘You could build a replica of this, now,’ said Rob. No, seriously, with all this data you could build an exact replica of Maes Howe….’

  ‘What, in the field next door?’

  He shrugged. ‘It’s not impossible, you know.’

  Rob stayed behind with the surveyors while I made the smallest and most changing of journeys, squeezing down a passageway and out into the world of sound and moving air. Dry winter grasses nodded in the breeze. By then, the sun had well and truely gone down on me, the clouds in the southern sky were glowing ruby-red above the hills. There had been no starry dark, and no sunset play of light. Oh well. I crossed the field and then the road, and back at the shop Alan, in his Historic Scotland tartan breeks, stood behind his counter. We drank coffee from a machine, and had a conversation about technology, about how the interior of a Neolithic tomb could be seen on a website. Then, as it happened, the phone rang. It was a local man telling Alan the website had a glitch, that he’d have to unplug everything and plug it all in again. The southwestern clouds were deep garnet-coloured now. Alan called into the tomb on the phone, asked Rob to fiddle with the webcam, then hung up.

  ‘Technology, eh?’ He shook his head. ‘Shall I show you what we do when it all breaks down?’

  He left his post behind the desk and crossed the shop, picking up from a wicker basket two Frisbees, one red, one blue. ‘If I hold them up in that window there, I can send a signal to Rob. Red Frisbee means “Stay over at the tomb, more visitors are coming.” Blue means “You can come back now”.’

  It was almost dark when I went back down to the car and, when I did the two surveyors were emerging from the tomb to go for their tea. They were figures crossing a darkening field, with the mound of Maes Howe behind them. One of them lifted his hand high in salutation, and I waved back, and for a moment they looked like astronauts emerging from a capsule after a successful mission.

  That’s what we’d been talking about, Alan and me. What, if the world lasts, would people five thousand years hence find worth saving of our age? They could scarce avoid all our plastic and junk, but what would they want? Something at the top of our competence, something that expressed the drama of our times and beliefs. Is there anything they’d come from afar to see, and find almost overwhelming? But, Alan said, there would be no need to keep anything, no need to come from afar. It would all be on virtual reality. Like now, with all this stereo photography and laser-scanning and photogrammetry and what have you, you could switch on your computer at home, put on your goggles and walk stooping into Maes Howe.

  I got into the car, turned the ignition, switched on the lights. The Apollo moon landing gear, that’s what. Those contraptions like washing machines wrapped in tin foil that were launched into lightless space, sometime in the Oil Age. That’s what we should keep. And maybe an offshore rig, where men actually worked day and night, slathered in the stuff, that we could have heat and movement and light. Let the future marvel over that. I pulled out onto the road, and drove to Stromness.

  In Stromness’ narrow, eighteenth-century street, it was time for coffee and cake and some Christmas shopping. I wandered into a toy shop, all bright and lit for Christmas, and in there picked up a silver plastic tiara. My little daughter had liked the Snow Queen; she would love this. Standing there in the bright shop with this ridiculous tiara in my hand, turning it so it sparkled, I was thinking about light. I suppose I’d been hoping for a trick of the light at Maes Howe. No, trick was the wrong word. The tomb-builders had constructed their cairn to admit a single beam of solstice light: it was the bending of a natural phenomenon to a human end, somewhere between technology and art. But not art either: drama. ‘Nowhere’, said George Mackay Brown, ‘is the drama of dark and light played out more starkly than in the north.’ A very ancient drama, going right back to the Neolithic. Were they the first people, I wondered, to articulate t
his metaphor of light and dark, of life and death…..

  Then the shop-keeper said ‘enjoy it while it lasts.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  She nodded toward the plastic tiara in my hand.

  ‘My little girl used to love these things, all glittery and bright. But she’s fourteen now, and wears nothing but black.’

  The surveyors finished their task very late that night, apparently, and were gone on the morning ferry, leaving the tomb ready for its little crowd of solstice visitors. I almost envied the surveyors the chance to move and work in the thick silence of the chambered cairn, passing laser beams over its stones. Few people can have spent so long within its confines since it was built. You pass a light-beam over the stone and record the infinitesimal time it takes to return to source. Light’s echo. Time at the speed of light.

  My ventures into light and dark had been ill-starred. I’d had no dramatic dark, neither at sea nor in the tomb, and no resurrecting beam of sunlight. But lasers are light, aren’t they? Intensified, organised light. I’d crept into Maes Howe at solstice, hoping for Neolithic technology; what I’d found was the technology of the 21st century. Here were skilled people passing light over these same stones, still making measurements by light and time. That thought pleased me.

  For five thousand years we have used darkness as the metaphor of our mortality. We were at the mercy of merciless death, which is darkness. When we died, they sent a beam of midwinter light in among our bones. What a tender, potent gesture. In the Christian era, we were laid in our graves to face the rising sun. We’re still mortal, still don’t want to die, don’t want our loved ones to die. That’s why the surveyors waved so heartily – if I’d spent ten days working in the house of the dead, dammit, I’d come out waving, too.