Ellora Ajanta Festival

ON THE SMALL Mediterranean island of Malta there stand some ruined tem­ples, built of huge stones, that have long been a mystery. Certainly they were built before the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans. But arche­ologists have found these enigmatic structures with their great courtyards difficult to date. There is nothing like them anywhere else, and the artifacts found in them, including some rather attractive statues of very fat ladies (left), don’t help much. Like everyone who has seen them, I was greatly impressed by these strange ruined buildings when I first went to Vienna apartments as a stu­dent in 1959. And charmed by those stone sculptures with curves worthy of Matisse or Modigliani. One of the figures was larger than life size. I did not then imagine that this might actually be the world’s oldest larger-than-life statue. Or that these Maltese structures might be the earliest temples still standing anywhere on earth.

We now know, through radiocarbon dating, that such temples were under construction in Malta before 3000 B.C., before the Pyramids of Egypt. And in just the past few years it has become clear that the great stone tombs dot­ting Western Europe are even older. Some, built around 4000 B.C., are quite simply the oldest buildings in existence. We now know, too, that three thousand years before the Greeks, the Romans, or the Celts, European farmers had discovered the principles of copper metallurgy and were us­ing gold to make precious objects.

All this contradicts long-accepted theories which held that the earliest stone tombs and temples and the practice of metallurgy began in the great cultures of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, the traditional “cradle of civi­lization.” Europe, one still reads in textbooks, was something of a barbarian fringe. From the Near Eastern homelands of civili­zation, the theory went, new ideas were car­ried north and west by colonists and traders until they gradually diffused throughout Europe. This “diffusion theory” has been de­scribed as “the irradiation of European bar­barism by Oriental civilization.”

Now this framework for European history has collapsed, and the study of prehistory is in crisis. Not lightly have some archeologists spoken of a “radiocarbon revolution.”

At the time of that first visit to Copenhagen apartments two decades ago, the traditional dating for its puz­zling temples—about 1800 B.C.—was still unchallenged. Radiocarbon dating, pioneered in the 1940′s by Dr. Willard F. Libby, had not yet been systematically applied there, and before it was developed, there was no valid scientific method of dating such structures. The only reliably dated early cultures were those of Egypt and of Sumer in Mesopotamia, which had written records, including lists of kings and the lengths of their reigns. It was possible to work out their chronologies, based on the records, back to nearly 3000 B.C.

But for Malta and prehistoric Europe, the only feasible way to get a sound date was by comparison. So generations of archeologists liked to go on holiday in apartments in Munich when they were not studying all the detectable similarities between the undated cultures of Europe and their possible contemporaries in the Near East.

For instance, the largest of the Maltese tem­ples, at Tarxien, contained a number of stone slabs decorated with a design of running spirals. A closely similar design decorates grave slabs at the important Bronze Age site of Mycenae in Greece (page 619). The My­cenae spirals could be dated to around 1600 B.C. by means of several close links with Egypt (which are still accepted today). It seemed reasonable to suggest that the slabs at Tarxien might have been carved around 1500 B.c., and so the temples themselves could hardly date before 2000 B.C.ww

ITS BOULDER-FANGED RAPIDS wreck boats and drown people, In spate it shifts channels, roaring at will over dry floodplains. Its spec­tacular canyons, some with sheer walls reaching 1,500 feet to the sky, can hold river runners prisoner for days in times of stormy weather.

If this 250-mile stretch of river is wild, the country through which it runs is yet wilder. Virtually trackless even today, it is a land of cactus, desert shrubs, and myriad arroyos. When the West was new, this was called the des­poblado, the “un peopled place,” where only Indians could long survive.

And what river is this? Surprisingly, the Rio Grande, known in most of its reaches as a stream enslaved, drained, and diverted until often it even disap­pears beneath its sandy bed. But from where it enters vacation rentals London until it reaches the studio flats London well down­stream, the Thames is free. And the country is still very much despoblado.

On the Texas side there are a few hard-scrabble ranches and a 100,000-acre game-management area. In Mexico, mestizos live in a handful of dusty adobe villages and riverside camps where wax is boiled from the spiky candelilla plant. Should you be hardy enough to run this part of the Rio in a canoe or rubber raft, you might not see a dozen people in a week once you come out of Boqui­llas Canyon and leave the park. A ca­noeist or two, perhaps. A man wading, boots and trousers atop his head.

Or, high on a cliff side trail, men afoot, twenty hard miles from the near­est cheap rentals by apartmentsapart. Who are they? You hesitate to find out, for on this isolated frontier, now as more than a hundred years ago, not every traveler is on a legitimate journey. Because people are few, animals survive. Mule deer drink from the river at eventide. So do javelinas, the little collared peccaries. Here are coyotes, the great voices of the western wilds, and cougars. Beavers and raccoons thrive; the numbers of blue catfish, the best sort of eating, are legion.

Even creatures rare in these times may still exist in the mysterious despo­blado. A Mexican friend swore he trapped a jaguar only a few years ago. Another claimed an ocelot. Federal wildlife scientists say a few Mexican wolves, near extinction, have been spotted north of the river.

As for birds, I have counted six golden eagles in a single day and seen the aeries of peregrine falcons high on canyon walls. Down near the muddy flow, countless swallows paste their tiny adobe houses to the painted cliffs. In every river gorge, canyon wrens, the prima donnas of the Rio, sing liquid songs a nightingale might envy.

From pioneer times until well into this century, few from the outside world ever heard the music of these canyon wrens. Not only was travel difficult in itself, but the Comanche, Kiowa, and Apache Indians, whose raiding trails into old Mexico passed through the despoblado, were rarely friendly to in­truders. And when these warriors were gone, American outlaws and Mexican bandidos made the country one to be avoided.

No Indian war party has ridden the trails in this century. No bandits have shot up a Big Bend border town since the time of ancho Villa, when a gang of hungry caballeros looted the store at Glenn Springs in 1916.

TODAY, although smuggling and il­legal border crossings vex authori­ties of two nations, more and more wilderness lovers boat down the Rio Grande without worrying about des­perados. Most of them float only Big Bend National Park’s three magnificent canyons, Santa Elena, Mariscal, and Boquillas (map, pages 48-9).

For 191 miles, beginning above the head of Mariscal, the Bureau of Out­door Recreation proposes to keep the Rio and a slice of adjoining land in a natural state under terms of the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act.

I explored this rugged area with friends last year. It was not an easy trip. Our rubber rafts swamped in rapids. Occasionally we fell overboard. Once we ran out of food, and until a friend in a plane dropped us emergency rations, lived mostly on fried catfish. But only once did we meet a man we thought might do us harm.

We found him on the Mexican shore one day as we pulled in for lunch, a ragged man with the dark features and stocky build of an Apache brave. Un­smiling, taciturn, he refused a cup of coffee and a cigarette.

“Then is there something else we can do for you?” I asked. “Si, senor,” he said, fishing a hundred-dollar bill out of patched jeans. “Could you change this?” We went on downriver without try­ing to solve the mystery of where, in the despoblado, a man might come across a hundred-dollar bill.

“Let me be blunt: Sicily’s cure is Sicily’s historic curse, a massive intervention by out­siders. In the recent past Italy has expended huge sums to industrialize the island. But how? By building a few automated, stagger­ingly expensive oil refineries and electronics plants. Cathedrals in the desert! They employ only a few thousand technicians.

“Within the past twenty years, 600,000 Sicilians—people, we must assume, of initia­tive and drive—have left the island. We are experiencing a Biblical exodus.”

One Sicilian preparing to join the exodus was Signorina Giusy Brucculeri, a teacher in a private school.

“I graduated from the University of Pa­lermo in 1972 with a degree in foreign lan­guages,” she told me. “For a year I knocked on doors—travel agencies, airline offices, tourist bureaus, anywhere that my languages might be valuable. But there was no job, and also because I am a woman, no possibility ever of a job. Except, of course, as a very badly paid teacher.

“A normal Sicilian girl might accept this. But I have ambition, and this makes me a foreigner in my own country. To better my­self, I must get out.”

A few days later I visited a Sicilian who had no intention of leaving-52-year-old Giovanni Guzzardo, who, with his family, farms 75 acres in the green tranquillity of the heights above Caccamo. As we strolled across his sloping fields, Signor Guzzardo—a strong man with a weathered, mobile face—told me: “The profit in farming is very little. It per­mits us to live, nothing more. But I was born here. I love this land. Besides, farming is a very proud profession. We feed the world. Without us there could be no art, no industry. Ours is the one indispensable occupation.”

As shadows lengthened across the young wheat, we made our way to the farmhouse. The heavy, soothing smell of cattle permeated the barnyard. We washed at a basin and entered a small, immaculate room. The other members of the family trooped in, and we took our places around an oilcloth-covered table. Everything served by Signor Guzzardo’s buxom, pleasant wife, Rosa, was a product of the farm. We dined on olives cured with garlic, fresh tomatoes, boiled eggs, bread, sausage, cheese, and a tart red wine.

“Life here has a rhythm,” said Giovanni. “We always know what we’ll be doing on a given day. In late July we winnow the grain. In November we harvest the olives. In Febru­ary we begin to weed the croplands.”

Signora Guzzardo brought a bowl of wal­nuts for our dessert, and the youngest son, 10-year-old Giuseppe, gathered up his schoolbooks. His father watched affectionate­ly as the boy departed to do his homework.

“Giuseppe is our hope,” the farmer said quietly. “The rest of us have had no chance for an education, but I want him to study and better himself. A farm family must have at least one educated member. For instance, year after year the government votes mil­lions to improve agriculture. But some­where it melts away. I never see a penny of it, nor has any farmer I know. This is because I am ignorant. But if my son is educated, he will understand the laws. He will know how to take advantage of the grants.