The Roman roads, that covered some 56,000 miles of the
ancient world and connected the firths of Scotland with the Euphrates, were
marked off every thousand paces with a milestone.
The roads were written
out like mathematical sums, solving the insoluble spaces. They added themselves to language and
to mental landscape as surely as to geometry, to sciences of measurement and
motion. “To lay out a road, the
linesman set out with a surveyor’s poles, a line which was called rigor was
laid down, and the straight line was corrected by the surveyor until it was ‘in
line.’” Thus rigorously in their
laying and their going they delineated the journey. Mile by mile by mile, they measured out the chancy mountains
or lands silvered with olives.
But one day in a
consequential July we find the twenty-fourth mile moved—casting the whole
equation into doubt.
We went down into
Switzerland this morning (I wrote on a page of fine blue squares torn from the
lab book I'd brought for the archaeology) after our breakfast of dry bread and
jam, following the descent of the Roman road out of the clouded mountains of
the Grand St. Bernard Pass to the nearest village, Bourg St.-Pierre. A town fragrant with wet hay, wild
thyme, camomile, and fennel, which grow wild there; where I crushed herbs with
my clunky hiking boots wherever I stepped. A town made for photography, with shutters the ice-melt
green of the lichen on the stone crags next to them, and splendid red-headed
chickens in a grand old stone structure with a screen door, grand as what is
left of the Norman castle and Charlemagne’s impossibly high bridge spanning the
cloud. A hospitable town where we
were given homemade cassis and local cheeses late in the morning in a room
above what was at one time hospital, jail, and stables.
In the middle of town is
the Roman milestone, a white column capped with marble and inscribed with Roman
numerals and Latin that I can’t read anymore. Latin! Who ever
would have thought I’d come across Latin again one day, outside the schoolbooks
I labored over back in seventh grade in Santa Fe in that sunny low-roofed
classroom with box elder bugs on the windowsill, sure it had nothing to do with
life or love or who I’d come to be.
I remember thinking of it (dry old Latin, all about phalanxes and
footsoldiers and decorum) pressed between pages like brittle flowers that have
lost their color. But all these
years later I’m sorry not to have teased out a little fragrance. XXIIII [sic] is all I can make out.
And even that turns out
to be wrong. It turns out that the
milestone has been moved down from the Pass. It marks the distance not from Bourg St.-Pierre, where it
stands, but from Mons Jovis, back up the steep drop where we’ve dropped from,
back up into the clouds, where the temple was to Jupiter, storm god of the
mountains, before the Christians chased him out and built their monastery with
appropriated pieces of temple marble and carted off the column too. (The phalanxes powerless to prevent
it.)
The roads all crossed
there: Celtic, Roman, Medieval,
Napoleonic. But the roads are
gone, now, except for the modern highway for the bright red tour busses which
is closed by snow ten months out of the year, and the scars of avalanches which
too look like ways down from the mountains. The bedrock is a cicatrix of vanished roads. The exact course of the Roman
road—the one we’re looking for—can only be guessed at, in the tumbled
fall of rock like a dry river bed, like the arroyos in New Mexico that carry vestiges
of thunderstorms and flash-floods.
And so the displaced
milestone measures something other than linear distance now. It marks a different kind of journey,
into ambiguity and flux and loss.
—Christie
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