“YOU LOVE LIFE but we love death” was the message from al-Qaeda’s caves on September 11 five years ago. I’ve been visiting caves of a different kind but the message was the same.
Nobody really knows who the peoples were who lived in the lofty, green mountains of southern Colombia in the centuries before and after Christ. They disappeared, leaving nothing but innumerable tombs, guarded by frightening, carved, stone figures: massive, snarling jaguar-men with gnashing teeth sacrificing new-born babies with stone knives. Their human sculptors long gone, they stand alone in the forest, grimaces frozen, silent beneath dripping trees. Few visit, but today you can, now that Colombia’s guerrillas are in retreat.
The tombs that these hallucinatory sculptures guard are incredible. Into the volcanic rock are bored huge vertical manholes up to 20 feet deep. Carved stone steps wind down where a doorway opens out into a room scooped from the rock. Rock pillars support its domed ceiling. Here, the dead were laid, surrounded by necessities for an imagined journey. Painted faces — in red and black — stare down from walls and ceilings.
These people had no iron. They carved stone with chisels of harder stone. Imagine the effort: tunnels, staircases, halls, chipped from solid rock. The notes in the lovingly kept little museums in San Agustín and Tierradentro remark that, for all we can learn, tombs were the principal product of these civilisations. Life seemed to revolve around death.
Is that what finished them? The burden that this fixation placed on an economy must have been crippling. In the interior life of a people, the relentless warping of focus away from the living and on to death surely debilitated them. The mainspring of life should be life. Open curiosity about this world, concern for the here and now — for the landscape this side of the River Styx — invigorates a culture. Death as a national idea is a throttling distraction.
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Fundamentalist Islam is a doctrine that must choke itself. Whether from the cave of Osama bin Laden or the tombs of the pre-Colombians, the message “You love life but we love death” should not scare us. It describes our strength.