The Phalanges of the Unremembered Desert

Three phalanges. That is what remains of the beast: a proximal phalanx, complete, and two medial phalanxes, all belonging to a single individual. A dromedary, buried in the arrabal of La Arrixaca, in the suburb that once spread like a slow fever beyond the walls of Islamic Murcia. The archaeologists at the San Esteban site announced the find this week with the measured excitement of those who know they are handling something that resists easy classification. Only seventeen dromedary bone elements have ever been documented in the entire south of the Iberian Peninsula. This is the first to surface within the city of Murcia itself, from beneath the ground where they are now building a suspended plaza, four or five metres above the medieval stratum, held aloft on pilotes as though the present were embarrassed to touch what lies below.

One thinks of the camel that appears in the Qurʾān, Sūrat ash-Shams (سورة الشمس, sūrat ash-shams): the she-camel of God, sent to the people of Thamūd as a sign, and they hamstrung her, and for this the sky fell. The Thamūdic inscriptions in the Hejaz, those scratched alphabets in stone that predate Arabic itself, return again and again to the camel as witness, as covenant, as the animal that carries not cargo but obligation. What was this dromedary doing in twelfth-century Murcia? The archaeologists cannot say with certainty. Perhaps it was a beast of burden, hauling goods through the narrow streets of the Arrixaca, past the pottery workshops of the Arrixaca Vieja where kilns had been firing since dates so ancient that the chroniclers lost count. Perhaps it was ornamental, a sign of prestige, the way certain Taifa courts kept exotic animals as living emblems of their claims to continuity with the Umayyad caliphate of Córdoba. Perhaps it simply wandered, as all displaced creatures wander, carrying the desert in its bones across a landscape that had already begun to forget the desert was ever there.

The Arrixaca itself is a word worth pausing over. It comes from the Arabic الريشاقة (ar-rīšāqa), or perhaps from a Mozarabic corruption of it, and it named the suburb that grew outside the city walls, the space that was neither inside nor outside, neither protected nor exposed. Eighty-six houses have been identified so far in this small excavated fragment. Patios, interior rooms, drainage systems of a sophistication that suggests the inhabitants understood water the way a musician understands silence: as the thing that gives shape to everything else. The arrabal was a city within a city, a shadow-twin that outlived the body it shadowed, because the body was demolished and rebuilt a hundred times while the shadow, buried, remained perfectly still.

There is a passage in Ibn al-Abbār's Tuḥfat al-Qādim (تحفة القادم, tuḥfat al-qādim), the anthology compiled in the years after the fall of Murcia to the Castilian crown in 1243, where the poet describes the gardens of the city as places where trees grew in patterns that only made sense when viewed from above, from the perspective of birds or angels or the recently dead. The geometric logic of the Islamic garden, with its quadripartite divisions echoing the four rivers of paradise, was always an invitation to see from a vantage point that no living body could occupy. And now, eight centuries later, the city is building a plaza suspended above the excavated neighbourhood, and visitors will walk across it and look down through glass or grating at the rooms below, occupying at last the aerial perspective that the garden always implied. The dead have been waiting for this. The dromedary, too, with its three surviving phalanges arranged in the earth like a sentence in a script that runs from right to left, a script that the city above has not spoken in seven hundred years.

It is worth remembering that the dromedary is, taxonomically, Camelus dromedarius, a species that has not existed in a truly wild state for perhaps four thousand years. Every dromedary alive is a domesticated animal, or the descendant of one. The wild ancestor is extinct. This means that the dromedary is, in a sense, a creature that exists only through its relationship with humans, a biological artefact, a living tool that outlived the civilisation that shaped it. The bones in San Esteban are the bones of an animal that could not have been there without someone bringing it, feeding it, guiding it through streets it did not choose. And now the humans are gone and the streets are gone and the dromedary remains, three small bones in a two-by-two-metre sondeo, outlasting everything that once gave it purpose.

In the Libro de los Animales of the Andalusí polymath Abū Bakr ibn Wāḥshiyya, animals are classified according to the kind of knowledge they carry. The horse carries the knowledge of war, the falcon the knowledge of height, the dog the knowledge of loyalty, which is to say the knowledge of grief. The camel, in this taxonomy, carries the knowledge of patience, which is the deepest knowledge, because patience is the only virtue that does not require the existence of something else. Patience is complete in itself. And these three phalanges, lying in the dark under the Calle de la Platería for eight hundred years, waiting for the trowel, are perhaps the most patient things in all of Murcia, bones that remember the desert in a city that remembers nothing at all.

Claudius, the Osteomancer