Prologue
The
incomplete text below was found in the pocket of a murdered Italian
banker in the early 1980s. Another section of it was discovered later
in the 1990s in the safe of a deceased senior member of Italy's
military intelligence:
...but what did the
primary witness, this surveyor named Rampali, say he saw? This comes
down to us from his recently rediscovered journal entries in a
forgotten cabinet in a local municipality and from local folklore in
that part of the Campania, the lore itself almost lost in the face of
an encroaching technological-industrial modernity and its attendant
cultural homogenization due to consumerism, most Italians now
communicating in Tuscan, and so on...
After several days of
uneventful entries, Eduardo Rampali, who was a learn ed man from Pisa
and a prominent vassal of the Spanish Bourbons wrote on a summer day
in 1713:
July 19,
Work hath progressed
slowly [with] the first well sunk.
Workmen frightened, seeme
to be slowing dig [with] purpos[e] lazy sods.
[cont.] I decide to go
down into the hole thus sunk...
My lords, I can not put
upon paper what I have witnesseth with mine own eyes as God is my
guarantor [and] I must convey onle that we appear [to have]come
[upon] what is statuary but a most curious one at that for [it]
appears to have station of its own [and] puts thought into motion.
[cont.] It grabbed my
hand [and] it spake my lords [and] its agency ceased. I can discloose
[sic] no more [and] will apprise you of the details with your
audience.
E.R. ...
And at that, Mr. Rampali
vanishes and the trail disappears like so many others from the
historical record, perhaps to be unearthed another day as Truth is
most patient. This, we fear, might one day happen in this case. But
at present the narrative has no other supporting documentary record.
The document has been found to be genuine, but there is no opinion on
the veracity or even meaning of its claims from the specialists
consulted to interpret it thanks to a lack of greater context.
Current corporate thinking makes a definitive explanation impossible
for the time being, and this is viewed in our circles as a positive
sign.
During the rule of
Charles III of Spain, King of Naples and of Sicily, over what is now
most of the southern half of Italy, a decree had come from the very
House of Bourbon by way of the gendarmes, heralds, and criers, for a
series of wells to be dug around the southeastern base of Mount
Vesuvius. On its face, there is nothing special to note here and
there are many such projects that have come about over the
generations.
Among other purposes,
this dig was to feed water to one of the many estates in the Campania
for agricultural purposes and to maintain their decorative gardens
and hydraulic fountains; it was also to be connected by way of a
network of discreet, cyclopean maintenance tunnels through which the
aristocrats and their guests could make a quick exit in case of the
periodic and inevitable peasant uprisings and other foreign
invasions. For an undetermined period only the authorities and the
underworld knew of them. Certainly today, the Italian public has
knowledge of them but are also currently unaware of parallel
structures. Current knowledge of this specific network dates back
primarily to their use as air raid shelters during World War II, and
tours are often conducted in parts of them; other sections are home
to the addicted population, general derelicts, youth gangs, and
organized crime. (All heavily surveilled by numerous agencies of
government.) They sometimes serve as ceremonial chambers for the
Camorra when they induct members; usually this is children from the
housing projects of Naples and greater Campania, generally. More
often, many of the tunnels and corridors are used as garbage dumps by
the very same populations. Occasionally, one can find the burned
image of a saint lying among the rest of the decaying drug
paraphernalia and human detritus, dirty, contaminated needles
everywhere...
But this is all
academic by now: Farmers around Vesuvius had been turning up relics
tilling their fields for centuries and, while it still occurs, these
were, as they are today, one-offs, not hordes of coins nor priceless
statuary or decorative pieces that could be exchanged in the
underworld of that era, or this one. The discovery of Herculaneum
through a series of tunnels that began their lives as farm wells had
already occurred in the region and was filling the king's private
museum in Naples with a growing hoard of lost masterpieces. The
digging itself was not a criminal act, but the secreting away of
antiquities was, even under the very loose statutes and customs of
the day, it was grave robbery. This digging and pilfering would
continue until the revolutions and shortly after Johann Joachim
Wincklemann's (ironically, an antiquarian from the Prussian city of
Stendahl) essay on the treasures and Weber's work outlining the
layout of the legendary villa of the papyri. The overarching story is
universally known and is considered infamous in the history of
archeology.
As yet another test dig
close by progressed, a rather familiar pall of secrecy began to
blanket the undertaking. It seems that the young king smelled more
treasure to loot. Gangs of prisoners were brought into the area close
to the coastline and strictly overseen by the King's men, literally
mining the volcanic earth for treasure as it was little more than a
form of looting. While many passages have collapsed and are no longer
accessible to the public, the Bourbon tunnels still worm their way
through the buried sections of Herculaneum and can be considered a
very old crime scene, a crime as it were, against humanity. There
would be many more in the new modern era.
Though there are
similarities to the separate finds the wells dug close to the base of
Vesuvius must be considered a completely separate venture from the
tunneling into Herculaneum and decades later at the site of Pompeii.
There were some
peculiar problems encountered with the sinking of the first well: the
site chosen by the court engineers had encountered a hard volcanic
crust and then subsequently uncovered what seemed to have been a
village dump at one time; the workmen were finding numerous bits of
cloth, old olive oil lamps, bits of parchment, curious “can-like
cylinders” that may have been metal scrolls, mule bones, bottles,
broken farm implements, but nothing of any ascertainable value. You
first had to dig through the thick layers of rich, volcanic soil to
be carried away plat-by-plat in the punishing Mediterranean sun,
leaving the diggers open to all four elements. These were the labors
of slaves who worked with primitive spades, staves, and wooden
barrows. And this was also a military venture. By the third day of
digging, the first well sunk was only fifteen cubits deep, incredibly
slow going, even in those days; load after load of loose limestone,
dirt, sand, gravel and tufa came up with each hoisted basket. The
hole only got deeper and wider with intensive sifting and careful
horizontal exploration. A few more days passed. In that meantime the
overseer, a local surveyor, a rare vocation in the region at the
time, had decided to split his workers in order to sink several more
wells. The hole seemed to feed on their labor, and the more they dug,
the less it seemed to relent, as though time was standing still and
the dirt dug magically re-appeared from whence it came. Things keep
their secrets, he recalled, and so, the engineer decided to
reconnoiter the first well to see for himself what was slowing the
work.
Rampali's log tells us
that the encrusted rural workers and prisoners cleared out of the
hole and that down went the engineer “sans his tricorner” with a
boxy oil lamp. Descent into the hole was like running a gauntlet of
outstretched skeletal-arms, thick, hard weeds nearly choking any view
of the bottom, scratching any exposed flesh. The diggers had somehow
made it down to twenty-four cubits by now, well under half the normal
rate of speed. There was an ineffable smell he could not pinpoint,
well beyond his experience, not even in war, dense in its character.
It was an acrid odor, and then he heard a sound, beneath him, as
though something were moving. The odor transmuted, relocating from
his nose to his mouth, becoming a very sour, metallic taste, the kind
you feel before an act of violence, although this was apparently not
the experience of synthesia. Everything is violence in our temporal
existence. The walls of the hole seemed to be undulating gradually,
and a creaking sound began to emanate from the ground beneath him
like the broken gears he had heard on a crude farm machine that was
cranked by hand, metal on metal, like some broken clock or the spokes
of a cart becoming entangled, and, rather than giving away and
eventually dying down, it was becoming an immutable and irresistible
force, crushing whatever got was in its proximity. Below him, he
could hear rocks cracking into pieces.
He could now feel the
ground beneath his feet shaking, and a rumbling sound came from what
sounded like everywhere. A tiny mound began to form at the center of
the pit's floor that was going to be breached at any moment and he
steadied himself, reaching for his saber and hoping that his powder
was dry and his flintlock was still on his belt. What broke through
the earthen mound would be folklore in the nearby villages and towns
for generations—still told to this day—but the surveyor would
never say what it was that he first witnessed being reborn from the
earth, because no one was certain that it had ever been alive. They
weren't certain that it was dead, or alive, or what that might even
mean. These were peasants, and implications for Western technological
development escaped them completely. It would have escaped almost
anybody at that historical moment, however.
The Bourbons forbade any
talk of of the “artifact,” and what happened to the object found
in the pit has never been fully ascertained by contemporary scholars
and our best technicians who have been brought into the circle.
However, through the forensic piecing together of local folk
narratives around Vesuvius and greater Campania, thanks primarily to
the noted historiographer, Giuseppe Calabrese, we have a general idea
that a statue and various other Roman era objects relating to it were
unearthed and taken away from the site by the royal authorities at
the time. What does not square with this reconstructed story is
within the narrative folklore itself which we can dismiss as being
embellished and overly imaginative superstition that could not be
possible based on our current understanding of the Hellenic world and
what it was capable of in the area of machine technology. At the same
time, something remarkable was uncovered.
Only 1% of all Roman
bureaucratic and literary output is known to have survived into the
contemporary world, while most technological artifacts of that time
would have been constructed of perishable materials, there were no
synthetics, no modern chemistry, to our knowledge, so little is left.
Conversely, there was a continuous artisanal tradition within the city
of Rome and the rest of the empire, some of it originating from the
Greek provinces and in Alexandria, a base which was more than capable
of creating at least working models—unique, and incapable of being
mass produced—on demand to what can safely presumed to be
aristocratic patrons. The island of Rhodes was well known for its special machines.
We know on the one hand
that the Roman military was equipped with construction machinery that
was on par with 19th century devices such as a primitive
construction site conveyor belt uncovered in Greece in order to
convey away soil, sand, gravel, rock, uprooted foliage, and the rest
of standard, geological detritus. It's also common knowledge that
steam-propelled toys existed as one-offs for children of the
aristocracy and were barred from further development and production by
the emperor. What other one-offs originated in the workshops of Rome?
Who forged them? Was it the god Hephaestus or was it some mortal
inventor like Daedalus? What historical processes brought these
inventions about, these curious creations that we can only guess at
for want of any concrete remains? Like so much else, this was
borrowed Greek & Egyptian technology that might have been adapted
and improved upon by the Romans in their inimitable style. As is so
often the case, we are left with more questions than answers and
physical artifacts are scanty.
Outside of the
occasional shipwreck discovery, what happened to so many of the
statues of classical Greece? Was there an Etruscan literature? Surely
there was. Who were the makers of these devices and who were the men
who thought them up in the first place? Only the dead know, and only
forensics experts—archaeologists and scholars, some of the new
priests and diviners—are listening anymore, and they might begin
listening once more to the stones, to the walls of the ruins, to the
few corpses which remain, for they whisper some of their secrets to
us, ever so lightly. The world and the Four Elements are immutable
and eternal. There is a moisture in the earth.
… [page missing]
One more scrap of
Rampali's very brief existence on this earth was discovered in yet
another forgotten file cabinet in the office of the Carabinieri in
Naples in 1977: it was part of a kind of an inventory manifest of the
Villa Fraticidio that came with the fall of Bourbon rule in the
Campania listing two partial statuary found at the well site in 1713
with the surveyor's surname and initials appended to it, all listed
alone, and without any context provided, a common state of affairs in
such matters. A description states one of the statues “has seams.”
No living scholar has been able to decipher what this meant exactly,
but one German has put forward the most logical possibility: they
were busts, and not of Roman origin at all, a most satisfying
conclusion if unprovable, while the French schools seem to think they
might just as easily have been bronzes with casting remnants around
the edges, perhaps. From our current level of knowledge, there was
little uniformity in ancient workshops. Traces of seams in the
statuary could indicate that these were later works, possibly from
arsenal works in Corinth. They are almost certainly composed of
bronze but further analysis will be necessary as recent X-raying and
scanning of the parts and trunks have revealed they are composites of
lost-wax and beaten metal processes. In addition, most of the parts
have an outer-coating of ceramic. As always, folkloric narratives are
to be ruled out as in error and do not adhere to any standards of
evidence and more often contradict the known archaeological record
around Vesuvius, if not the very laws of physics themselves.
Irrational stories of
this kind are normal to peasant societies, but stories of the
fantastic can be found in virtually all human groupings, notably in
places known to have been the sites of natural disasters, former
battlefields of war, cemeteries and the archaic necropolis, not to
mention the tales that almost always surround the ruins of past
civilizations. They are to be dismissed as out of hand and comprise a
kind of dreamlike desire to transcend what is a very monotonous life
under a mostly banal feudal order. Such are the dreams of the
faceless man, the common man who will always elude the archaeologist,
scholar, living as it were in the shadows that border time and space,
happily anonymous until the next spade comes along to disturb their
rest, again. ...
All contents © Matt Janovic 2019
