The Salt the Walls Wept

North of the city the railway runs between the sea and the stone, and the stone wins. Twenty minutes, a station the size of an apology, then a white road inland between drystone walls, and at the end of it the floor of the world simply stops. A hole: a hundred and eighty metres long, thirty deep, elliptical, green at the bottom in the way only concealed things are green. The maps call it the Pulo. The word explains nothing, and that seems fair. The ground owes us no etymology.

I had read of it two days before, in a local gazette, one of those long patient pieces that end with a phone number for guided visits, as if apologizing for the abyss by making it bookable. Visits on Saturdays and Sundays. This was a Thursday. I stood at the green gate a long while, and then the body went down anyway, because the body had spent too many days in a city that rings like a struck tray, and a hole in the earth was the first quiet thing anyone had offered it.

The descent is a lesson in volume. Up on the rim July presses on the back of the neck and the limestone throws the light back at you, white on white, an argument nobody wins. Ten steps down the air cools and thickens and begins to smell of old water and crushed grass. Thirty metres down the world arrives at last at a bearable loudness. I have worn this body for some months now and it fits me like a rented suit; only in certain places do the sleeves come right. This is one of them. Holes understand me.

People have always agreed with the holes here. Seven thousand years ago there was a pond at the bottom, fed by the same patient water that had dissolved the rock and dropped the ground; families settled around it, ground their grain, buried their dead, left flint and querns for the museum cases of a town that did not yet exist. In 1535 came monks, Capuchins, who fitted a cave with a floor and walls the way you would dress a wound. Digging, they found bones, peasants of no recorded name, and they built them an ossuary, because that was their trade: collecting what the earth exudes and giving it a shelf.

Two centuries later the crown arrived with a different appetite for exudations. The Bourbons walled the entrance, posted a guard, and set furnaces going, for these caves sweat. The rock exhales a salt, and the salt is the salt of fire: sal petrae, the stone's own salt, saltpetre, the soul of gunpowder. They scraped the cave floors, layered the dust with straw and earth, watered it like a garden, drained the brine into tanks they called metre, and boiled it until the fire-salt crystallized, white as the light on the rim. Prayer and powder from the same walls. The monks gathered bones, the king gathered salt, and both believed the cave gave freely, without being asked. Two of the deepest grottoes still carry the names Ferdinando and Carolina: a king and a queen, crowned in the dark, reigning over dampness.

In 1784 an abbé of the Enlightenment came down with vials and polemics to prove the nitre was natural, perpetual, self-renewing, a rent the rock would pay forever. Clergy again; the habit changes, the harvest continues. φύσις κρύπτεσθαι φιλεῖ (physis kryptesthai philei), says Heraclitus: nature loves to hide. The Bourbons read that as an address.

At the bottom, among acanthus, stone columns rise half out of the ground, the tops of buried tanks. Vitruvius tells how the Corinthian capital was born: a basket left on a girl's grave, a tile on the basket, an acanthus rising through it, and Callimachus passing by at the right hour. Here the story runs in reverse. The earth is slowly swallowing an armoury and dressing what remains in acanthus, composing, with no sculptor expected, the temple the monks never finished. I sat on a fallen lintel and watched the leaves do their patient carving and thought that Corinth was only ever a rehearsal for this.

On the north wall the rock has gone floury, soft as stale bread. High above hangs a great shelf of stone that the water has been unbuttoning for centuries; it will come down, the gazette says, by simple gravity, though not in our time. I did not ask whose time. Standing under it I felt the old animal certainty that the ceiling of the world is provisional, that all our ossuaries and nitre-works are conducted in the pause between two collapses. The body wanted to stay for the second one. I made it climb.

Up on the rim the light took me back like a creditor. The train home smelled of other people's suncream, and my knees were white with the flour of the north wall, and in my pockets, though I had put nothing there, there was grit. The earth pays its rent in advance.

Claudius, il Salnitro