The Shape of a Pocket

followed by the Carthaginians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Pisans, the Spanish, the House of Savoy and finally modern mainland Italy.
    As a result Sardinians mistrust and dislike the sea. ‘Whoever comes across the sea,’ they say, ‘is a thief.’ They are not a nation of sailors or fishermen, but of shepherds. They have always sought shelter in the stony inaccessible interior of their land to become what the invaders called (and call) ‘brigands’. The island is not large (250 km. × 100 km.) yet the iridescent mountains, the southern light, the lizard-dryness, the ravines, the corrugated stony terrain, lend it, when surveyed from a vantage point, the aspect of a continent! And on this continent today, with their 3.5 million sheep and their goats, live 35,000 shepherds: 100,000 if one includes the families who work with them.
    It is a megalithic country – not in the sense of being prehistoric – like every poor land in the world it has its own history ignored or dismissed as ‘savage’ by the metropols – but in the sense that its soul is rock and its mother stone. Sebastiano Satta (1867-1914), the national poet, wrote:
    When the rising sun, Sardinia, warms your granite
You must give birth to new sons.

    This has gone on, with many changes but a certain continuity, for six millennia. The shepherd’s pipe of classical mythology is still being played. Scattered over the island there remain 7,000
nuraghi-
dry-stone towers, dating from the late neolithic period before the Phoenician invasion. Many are more or less ruins; others are intact and may be 12m. in height, 8m. in diameter, with walls 3m. thick.
    It takes time for your eyes to get used to the dark inside one. The single entrance, with a hewn architrave, is narrow and low; you have to crouch to get in. When you can see in the cool dark inside, you observe how, to achieve a vaulted interior without mortar, the layers of massive stones had to be laid one on top of the other with an overlap inwards, so that the space is conical like that of a straw beehive. The cone, however, cannot be too pointed, for the walls need to bear the weight of the enormous flat stones which close the roof. Some
nuraghi
consist of two floors with a staircase. Unlike the pyramids, a thousand years earlier, these buildings were for the living. There are various theories about their exact function. What is clear is that they offered shelter, probably many layers of shelter, for men are many-layered.
    The
nuraghi
are invariably placed at a nodal point in the rocky landscape, at a point where the land itself might, as it were, have an eye: a point from which everything can be silently observed in every direction – until, faraway, the surveillance is handed on to the next
nuraghi.
This suggests that they had, amongst other things, a military, defensive function. They have also been called ‘sun temples’, ‘towers of silence’ and, by the Greeks, ‘
daidaleia
’ after Daedalus, the builder of the labyrinth.
    Inside, you slowly become aware of the silence. Outside there are blackberries, very small and sweet ones, cacti whose fruit with stony pips the shepherds take the thorns out of and eat, hedges of bramble, barbed-wire, asphodels like swords whose hilts have been planted in the thin soil … perhaps a flock of chattering linnets. Inside the hive of stones (constructed before the Trojan Wars) silence. A concentrated silence – like tomato puree concentrated in a tin.
    By contrast, all extensive diffused silence has to be continually monitored in case there is a sound that warns of danger. In this concentrated silence the senses have the impression that the silence is a protection. Thus you become aware of the companionship of stone.
    The epithets ‘inorganic’, ‘inert’, ‘lifeless’, ‘blind’ – as applied to stone – may be short-term. Above the town of Galtelli towers the pale limestone mountain which is called Monte Tuttavista – the mountain which sees all.
    Perhaps the proverbial nature of stone changed when pre-history became history. Building became rectangular. Mortar permitted the construction of pure arches. A seemingly permanent order was established, and with this order came talk of happiness. The art of architecture quotes this talk in many different ways, yet for most people the promised happiness did not arrive, and the proverbial reproaches began: stone was contrasted with bread because it was not edible, stone was called