The Arrogant Emu

Afterwards, we all piled into the vans (have you noticed, that some things you get into and some things you pile into?) and headed down the road out of the other side of Orvieto. (There was a road, apparently - but I think only one.

We then visited an Etruscan necropolis, which Gravus’ father (also an eminent archaeologist) had at one time excavated.

After lunch, Gravus (who, as I was later to learn, has the keys to everything) took us into the "citta sotteraneo", the delvings into the the volcanic rock beneath the city, forming a complex of caves.

Some had been dug in the earliest times, and all times subsequent had found some sort of use for the tufo that the city was built on. We saw Etruscan well-shafts, Roman quarrying operations (tufo, when it gets to a certain stage, turns into a very crumbly sort of rock that is used in make cement). Some caves had been used as storage and productions rooms for olive oil, since they were all at a consistent temperature throughout the year. We passed through a room with a series of holes in the wall, like postal-slots.

"What would you think, upon first seeing this?" inquired Gravus, who had been leading us through the caves with an informal, informative sort of a lecture that made me realize that he was a very good teacher. "It looks almost funerary, and that was what many people thought." He pointed out certain features of the room.

"However, these pigeon-holes are exactly that. Pigeon holes. This is a columbiary."

Pencils scratched against notebooks, hurrying to get the word down. Its proper spelling would have to come later.

"It’s the young pigeons that they would eat. All you have to do is come and take them out of the nest." He indicated the passages that led to and from the room. "Pigeons are stupid. They still kept coming back, and nesting in the same spots, even though some of them kept disappearing."

"Why aren’t there any pigeons now?" someone inquired.

Gravus grinned. "Weasels. There are weasels in the caves now that nobody keeps them out. And pigeons are stupid, but they understand weasels."

I had never known it before, but I am used to thinking in two dimensions. There is the surface of the world, and there are the people and objects on it, moving about in flat patterns, all plottable on an X-Y axis. And then there’s the sky, another flat plane, full of wonderful and changing pictures, spread above us. Everything is a single plane, or one sort or another - even the vertical walls which I love so dearly are two-dimensional; our buildings also. They may be three-dimensional in reality, but they feel mostly like an organization of two-dimensional things.

But starting with the statues in Rome I was being initiated into a new way of seeing things, which I think also accounted to the uncomfortable (although not unpleasant) sensation of stretching in my head.

I was learning to see in three dimensions, to see a space as space and not as a series of planes. Similarly for time; I was having to contain, all at once, history’s presence and absence. It was here, but it was not now.

This leap from one dimension to another is like the leap that drops you into calculus, only now my mind was making it on its own and I was only following behind.

I wouldn’t have thought that processed bread and cheese were even available in Italy, but there they were, sitting in front of us and waiting to be eaten for lunch. I own myself disappointed by this. I feared that this was to be our fare, morning, noon, and night - and what a waste that would be!

But, reflecting that privation and bad food are practically de rigeur on archaeological digs, and thinking that I had better get used to it and learn to enjoy it, I closed my eyes and tucked in. Of course, I then opened my eyes quite promptly, because even if we were going to waste culinary opportunities, there was no need at all to waste consciousness of our location.

I mean, would you close your eyes, except to blink, if you had found yourself where I was? We were in a park a little way down from the main part of the town, sitting at a covered picnic table and looking out across the land. The hills below us were covered with fields - wheat, sunflowers - and here and there I could see, with clarity not diminished by distance, some old stone building. I asked about them: castles, villas, abbeys that had been turned into inns or restaurants.

Despite having such a wide and magnificent view, and being so high up, there was nothing like the consciousness of height (which for some people and sometimes for me also translates to fear) that would usually accompany such a capacity to see. It felt more as if I were flying. Birds - swallows, mostly - wheeled and soared through the air, now ten feet away from the ground, now hundreds of feet away, as they flew over the picnic table and then out into the air.

Our lab director and self-described den mother, Signette Nuda, made her appearance about this time also. One could not possibly be intimidated by Signette, no matter how had one tried. She reminded me, both in form and in character, of one youth-leader we had had at our church. This woman had been large, soft, helpful, motherly, of middle age but with a tendency to act (at time unbecomingly) girlishly.

The assembled group walked a little way down into a park looking out over the land. Here I should add a few notes about Orvieto’s position. One reaches the town itself by cable car, because the city covers what appears to be the entire top of a volcanic plateau. Tufo, a certian sort of volcanic stone, forms the cliffs that drop away directly from the outer walls of the city, so that Orvieto is sitting on top of a low cylinder (low for mountains, I mean) of bare rock.