Latin American Fiction
Michael B. Miller
Traducciones español-inglés

Chapter I

God’s Letter to Humanity

The Order of the World

The return path out of the Sima de los Huesos dig (literally "Pit of the Bones") culminates in a steep slope formed by a cone of limestone slabs. At the incline’s highest point, the floor of the cave rises up and almost touches the ceiling. If the same thing had happened in the Cueva Mayor and all its tunnels, they would not have been discovered.

It often happens that the build-up of deposits hides the entrances to caves and renders them inaccessible to the rest of the network of channels known as the karst system. The digs that are being excavated at Atapuerca’s Trinchera del Ferrocarril site are of that type: mouths of caves closed off by many tons of sediment. One of them is the famous Gran Dolina, with human fossils 800,000 years old, the first inhabitants known in Europe; another of the caves (called Sima del Elefante), which has older animal fossils (more than a million years old), was one of the entrances, now closed off, to the network of tunnels in the Cueva Mayor.

Once past the bottleneck, it opens onto a large room, known as the Portalón. The Portalón, in turn, is located at the foot of a great fissure or crack in the side of the mountain, which runs almost unnoticed to the top. That’s why it is an ideal place to take refuge, cool when the heat outside is unbearable, and warm during the coldest months. There is proof that the people of the Neolithic Period and the Bronze Age resided here and it is also possible that they occupied it in the Paleolithic Age. The excavations that are underway will one day tell us. From the Portalón, another long tunnel, called the Galería del Sílex, branches off and was used for funereal purposes by the residents of the Neolithic Period and the Bronze Age.

In order to exit through the lateral opening, one ascends a short but steep path squeezed between two walls and hidden from view until one reaches the summit. This trail up the side of Sima de los Huesos is long and fatiguing (altogether, more than 197 feet up), but it affords a view of a dazzling landscape after so much darkness.

On the first level are the limestone skirts of the Sierra de Atapuerca, covered by a forest of holm and gall oaks. During the spring and summer months, the gall oaks are barely distinguishable from the former; but during the fall and winter months the leaves of the galls, unlike those of the holms, wither, yet are not totally lost, and its contour is unmistakable. Below, one can see the fertile but limited plain of the Arlanzón River, marked by a basin. There are numerous orchards there. The course of the river is visible through the stand of poplars and ash trees which runs along it. Spread out between the river and the limestone are fields of cereal grain: whitish barley and golden wheat. The soil is soft and covered with deposits of terraced pebbles. Here and there one sees patches of chestnut-oaks (or turkey oaks) which once occupied the entire terrain of what is today cultivated land.

Looking out toward the river, to the south, one can see the cars that travel the highway, crossing the town of Ibeas de Juarros, and far in the distance, two large hills are visible, at whose feet lies the town of Covarrubias. To the west lies the great Castilian plateau, and stretched out along the Arlanzón River is the city of Burgos; on a clear day the spires of its cathedral are distinctly visible. But to the east, the landscape is dominated by the high summits of the Sierra de la Demanda, with the San Millán peak standing out above all the rest. On the last glaciation, the Sierra de la Demanda gave shelter to small glaciers in its deep gorges.

The landscape that the Neolithic and Bronze Age farmers and cattle breeders gazed upon could not have been much different from what we see today, although the geographic of chestnut-oaks no doubt extended much farther; we ourselves have seen it recede in recent years. The residents of the Neolithic period were, nevertheless, the first to open clearings in the forest in order to tend cattle and cultivate grain. The axe, fire, and the teeth of domestic animals were their allies. Great urban concentrations were nonexistent then as was, of course, the automobile.

However, the inhabitants of the middle Pleistocene Age, who appeared 350,000 years ago outside the Cueva Mayor, saw the river run much closer; in fact, for thousands of years, the river had been forging its basin in the soft terrain and moving away from the hard limestone of the Sierra. During the various phases of carving itself out, the Arlanzón deposited stones on the plateaus that today have been converted into cultivated fields. On the other hand, during the Paleolithic period the impact of man on the ecosystems was incomparably smaller.

In the soft twilight of a day at the end of July, a gentle wind stirs the grain in the cornfields, and the landscape produces a pleasant feeling of harmony and placidness.

This impression of standing before a painting, at once perfect and complete, is one expressed by so many poets in verses that sing of the serene beauty of nature. Everything seems to be in its proper place, fulfilling its destiny. We are overcome with the peace that provides order.

And that idea, the one that nature is ordered, has been used as a proof of the existence of a Great Architect of the Cosmos. The very word cosmos, from the Greek, means "order." The study of the cosmos, conceived as an ordered whole, whose function and nature can be understand through reason, was what gave rise to Greek philosophy; to discover what was the origin--arjé--of the world was the first question posed by the philosophers.