Reading the landscape

UNESCO Courier, May, 1997 by Yves Bergeret

There is always an interaction between people and the places where they live and move and have their being. Wherever you are, on familiar or unfamiliar ground, other people have been there before you or are there with you, silent or noisy companions. Wherever you go, there are signs of human presence. You are surrounded by an all-pervasive language, speaking with one or many voices, dead or alive. The physical sediment of that language, deposited on objects and scenery, constitutes what I mean when I use the word landscape.

* Seashells in the sand

Looking down from the aircraft window as you cross the Atlantic coming from Europe, you see tiny islands and great white filaments of cloud stretched above the distant surface of the ocean, an abstract spectacle dreamlike in its ever-changing beauty. You land on a Caribbean island. Immediately you are enveloped by the sultry heat. You drive to a small town, not far from the sea. It is already dark, and the chorus of insects and frogs is in full swing. Eventually you drop off to sleep in this completely alien world. When you wake up early the next morning, the sun is already beating down with all its force. You walk around the town. The trees are quivering in the sea wind. Leaving behind the fish market and a knot of huts buried in the vegetation, you come to a cemetery at the sea's edge. You walk along rows of graves covered in white tiles. Suddenly the cemetery gives way to the near-black sand of volcanic islands. In a plot a few yards square there are a series of mounds, each the length of a human body, around which "lambis" - large conch-like seashells - have been driven into the sand, the pointed end downwards and the big, ochre-coloured end upwards and open to the air. Under these simple mounds some of the town's poorest people, penniless old sailors, have unceremoniously been laid to rest, naked, with only the sea and some of its creatures, and the black sand over them.

These unadorned graves speak volumes. The seashells are the loudhailers of the dead and the ear-trumpets with which they listen to the voices of the living and hear the sea wind. Until quite recently, the same kind of shells were used by fishermen as loudspeakers as they drew near to the shore at night. There is something admirable about these graves: the dead are respected and their spirits are addressed via one of the most beautiful and natural objects the landscape has to offer. You are on one of those groups of islands between English-speaking North America and Latin America, between the Old World which has left its colonial imprint, and the faint memory of pre-Columbian populations exterminated by settlers from the Old World, between a remembered past in Africa whence, because of the slave trade, most of the population is descended, and a present of ethnic intermingling. You are on a volcanic island subject to eruptions and cyclones. In this environment of chronic instability and general rootlessness, the landscape is a medium of human dialogue.

* Waymarks in the mountains

I would like to cite mountains, supposedly the wildest of the world's wild places, as an extreme example of the human quality of the landscape. I have climbed many mountains, trekked across many wastelands, from Iceland to Chile, from Afghanistan to the Sahara, from the Troodos mountains of Cyprus to Mount Pelee in Martinique. Having had this practical experience and having got to know mountains as they really are, I have observed that a mountain is never virgin territory. Everywhere there are visible signs of human presence and human labour that were specifically designed to be visible - tracks, embankments, terraces, dwellings, markers of all kinds.

Even in barren desert uplands you will see where animals have grazed. You will come across a tent whose occupants will greet you and invite you to share their food or drink and join in their conversation. In another place, when you thought you were completely alone, you suddenly come upon a few piles of stones or a heap of round pebbles in a dry river bed put there as landmarks or boundary stones to show the limits of the grazing grounds. In desert regions and places where there is little agriculture, these practices still continue. In the mountainous regions of Europe they have a different function. The mounds of stones known as cairns now serve to show hill-walkers the way in the absence of a track. These "waymarks" are living things. If you remember, you add another stone to the pile for the benefit of the strangers who will come this way after you.

Sometimes landscape has religious rather than secular associations. Mount Sinai is the place where the God of the three great monotheistic religions spoke with a human voice to give humankind ten rules to live by. In this case we have a monologue rather than a dialogue: God issues commands. On some mountain tops there are small shrines, stupas, crosses or votive tablets. The summits of the Italian Alps provide a particularly vivid illustration of this. On many of them there is a small statue of the Virgin, affording protection from lightning and misfortune. The Christian traveller should thank her on reaching the summit.