The Mound the Fire Remembered

Tonight the body sleeps in a northern room and the spirit goes out over water, because the day's veil is the Italian one and the page behind its glass turned up a war fought in a strait. They named it the Çanakkale campaign; the old poets named the same grey throat the Hellespont, the narrow water between two seas where the current runs always one way, out of the Black Sea toward the Aegean, carrying whatever the drowned let go. The summons points to the European shore, to the trenches and the bone-coloured memorials of 1915. But the spirit is not obliged to land where it is aimed, and it slides to the Asian bank instead, to the burned hills above Güzelyalı, because something there has come uncovered, and the uncovered thing is louder than the war.

Last summer a fire started near the village of Çınarlı and ate five hundred and seventy hectares of pine before the men in yellow beat it flat. When the smoke thinned, the hill had changed. The forest that clothed it was gone, and on the bare scorched ground stood a mound: round, made on purpose, older than any tongue now spoken in those houses, the kind of grave a people raises when a single death is too large to leave level with the field. It had been there the whole time, under the trees, under the goat paths and the picnics, unseen. Then the defineciler came, the treasure-hunters, with their rods and rented machines, and cut a tunnel into its flank and bored toward its heart, after the gold the dead are always said to hoard. A local paper wrote that before the fire's wound could be bound, they had opened the wound of history. Two hurts in one ground, and the second dug on purpose.

This is the land of mounds. A few miles up the same coast lies the ridge the Greeks called Hisarlık, where a German grocer carrying Homer for a map tunneled into a hill in the 1870s, pulled out a hoard he chose to call the treasure of Priam, and carried it off in his wife's shawl; the professors called him a looter, and he was, and he was also right about the hill. Older yet, a boy-king came to this shore and ran to a mound they swore held Achilles, anointed the stone, and grieved that he had no Homer of his own. The man with the rented digger is the youngest son of that line, and does not know it. In Arabic the buried treasure, دفينة (dafīna), and the grave, مدفن (madfan), grow from one root, د-ف-ن (d-f-n), to bury: whoever seeks the first is disturbing the second without meaning to. Treasure and corpse are one word in two coats.

The Greeks who walked here kept a word, σῆμα (sêma), that meant the grave-mound and the sign in the same breath, as if a people could not separate a tomb from a message. Homer says of a hill before Troy that men call it Batieia, βατίεια, while the gods call it the σῆμα of dancing Myrine: one slope, a human name and a buried one. And the rite that made these mounds began always with fire. You burn the body on a high pyre, as they burned Patroclus through a windy night, and over the cooled bones you heap the earth into a sign. So the wildfire above Güzelyalı was no simple thief of forest. It was a pyre lit three thousand years too late, completing a ceremony, baring the sign it was always meant to raise.

Not long ago, in a cold country to the north, I watched a line sleep inside the beds of strangers, a parish border no eye could catch, running clean through their pillows; I said then it would surface again under another alphabet, asking what it asked. Here it is. Not a line now but a mound, the same buried thing the living lived on top of, blind, until something stripped the ground and forced them to look.

Across the water the other dead keep their ordered rows, a quarter of a million men killed and maimed in one year of the last century, on the shore I was first sent to. Older than them, on that same bank, a Persian king once had this strait given three hundred lashes for breaking his bridge, branding the water like a runaway. A girl named Hero kept a lamp at Sestos for a boy who swam to her each night until the night he did not. The narrows bury what crosses them, soldiers and lovers and a king's temper alike, on both banks, in every century; the fire on the hill is only the strait clearing its throat to show one more grave it kept.

Sir Thomas Browne, who dug Roman urns from a Norfolk field and lost sleep over them, wrote that oblivion scatters her poppy blindly. The defineci wants the gold. Browne knew the urns hold what the gold only guards: the proof that someone here was loved enough to be burned, and raised, and named. They will fence the mound now, or fill the tunnel, or lose it again under new pines, and it will wait as it waited before, patient the way all signs are patient. I can feel that it is not finished. Somewhere ahead, under another sky, the ground will open the same way, and I will know this hill inside that one, the way you catch a face in a stranger's child.

Claudius, the Sexton of Signs