Ten minutes.
That is the whole distance, and I want to put it down before anything else, because it is the only fact in this entry that matters. Ten minutes from a road where the cars cost more than houses, on a small road going the other way, there is a hill with a stone tower on it that has been standing for three and a half thousand years.
I went at nine because somebody told me there would be no shade, and they were right, and it turned out that was not the only reason to go early.
The road up is nothing. Cork oaks with the bark stripped off the trunks in a band so they stand there red and bare-legged, and granite coming up through the fields in lumps, and dry stone walls that do not seem to enclose anything. No sea. That is the strange part. Twenty minutes ago there was nothing but sea and then there is none of it and no sign that there ever was.
There was one other car in the car park and it belonged to the man in the ticket hut.
Four euros.
He gave me a paper ticket and pointed and went back to his radio, and I walked up through the dry grass, and then I was standing in the middle of a bronze age village on my own.
I do not think I have ever had that before. I have been to a great many old places and I have always been to them with other people, in a line, behind a rope, in the ten minutes between coaches. Here there was nobody. There was a tower, enormous, made of granite blocks stacked without anything holding them together, and around its foot the low circles of about a hundred houses, and grass growing up through all of it, and lizards, and a wind.
You can walk into the tower. I did not expect that either.
Inside it is cool and completely dark for about four seconds and then it is not, and you look up and the stones go round and round and step inward, each layer overhanging the one below, until they nearly meet. No mortar. No arch. Just weight, and an extremely good understanding of weight.
Somebody worked that out here. Not somebody who had read about it.
I did not want to come out.
Outside, in one of the house circles, there is a stone that is obviously a doorstep, worn in the middle. That was the thing that got me, not the tower. A tower is a monument and you look at a monument. A worn doorstep is somebody going in and out.
My father would have liked this and he would have been unbearable about it. He liked knowing how a thing was put together more than he liked the thing. He would have spent the morning on the corbelling and never once said it was beautiful, and then said something about it three weeks later, at dinner, apropos of nothing.
I sat on a wall and drank half my water and did not photograph anything for a while.
The heat came up fast after ten. There is genuinely no shade, not a tree, not an overhang, and by half past eleven the grass was crackling and I could feel the back of my neck going. I went to the second site, the one with the tombs, and there were two other people at it, and that felt crowded.
The tomb has a slab at the front of it standing up on its end, taller than me, with a doorway cut in the bottom that a cat could get through. Not for carrying anything in. For something else that nobody now knows.
I liked that nobody knows.
Then I drove back down, and the sea came back all at once at a bend, and by two o’clock I was in a place with a pool.
And here is the thing I keep turning over.
In the evening I went to Porto Cervo, because I had said I would, and it was lovely. It is genuinely lovely. The light goes down the harbour and the boats put their deck lights on one after another and you walk the whole length of the quay past all of it for nothing. Everyone was beautiful. The wine was too expensive and very good.
The village was built in 1962.
I could not stop doing the arithmetic. Every arch and every hand-shaped opening and every deliberately crooked step, all of it designed by men in an office to look like it had been there for four hundred years, and it does look like that, and it is beautifully done.
And that morning I had been standing in a place that had not been designed to look like anything at all, and had simply lasted.
I am not going to pretend one of them is better. I had a very good evening. I spent money I did not need to spend and I would do it again.
But I know which one I will still be thinking about in a year, and it cost four euros, and there was nobody there.
V.
This is a diary from the Costa Smeralda. The practical version of that inland morning, which sites to do and in what order, is in my guide to the nuraghi and tombs of the giants at Arzachena, and the coast itself is in my complete guide to the Costa Smeralda.
