You can visit the places where they lived and search the hills and enter the caves and burrows overgrown with trees. Uneasily you look at thecippi—stone symbols outside their tombs, a phallus to show that a man lies within, a house with a triangular roof to indicate a woman. That is to say, you can find the Etruscans—if you pretend. Because of the murals and painted ceramics, because of what you have been told or have read, you dimly perceive them. Almost. But it doesn’t quite work. Imagination fails. There is no authentic Etruscan sound, no touch of an Etruscan hand, nor the odor of a plump Etruscan body. They seem to be present, yet they are not.
At last you return comfortably to Rome on the bus, having been told about Etruscans; or you return by yourself, exhausted and sweaty and confused, knowing no more, the past unrecaptured.
A Roman art dealer named Augusto Jandolo got a little closer. When he was a boy in Tuscany he watched as the sarcophagus of a Tarquinian nobleman was opened. The great stone cover was difficult to lift; but finally it rose, stood on end for a moment, and fell heavily aside. Then, says Jandolo, he saw something that he would remember until his dying day:
Inside the sarcophagus I saw resting the body of a young warrior in full accoutrements, with helmet, spear, shield, and greaves. Let me stress that it was not a skeleton I saw; I saw a body, with all its limbs in place, stiffly outstretched as though the dead man had just been laid in the grave. It was the appearance of but a moment. Then, by the light of the torches, everything seemed to dissolve. The helmet rolled to the right, the round shield fell into the collapsed breastplate of the armor, the greaves flattened out at the bottom of the sarcophagus, one on the right, the other on the left. At the first contact with air the body which had lain inviolate for centuries suddenly dissolved into dust. . . . In the air, however, and around the torches, a golden powder seemed to be hovering.
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Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
1. Olduvai & All That
2. Eca Suthi . . .
3. Vinland Vínland
4. Gustav’s Dreadnought
5. The White Lantern
6. Syllables Here and There
7. Abracadastra
8. Various Tourists
9. The Aztec Treasure House
10. Aristokles’ Atlantis
11. The Innocents’ Crusade
12. Prester John
13. To the Indies
14. The Sea Must Have an Endynge
15. El Dorado
16. Seven Cities
17. Gold! Gold! Gold!
18. Philippus Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus ab Hohenheim & Co.
19. Mesa Verde
20. Messages on a Sandstone Bluff
Bibliography
