Still, I nudge her up the trail in the direction of the ancient village, impatient to get an estranged hint of the original Sard people and how they lived, but hoping this diversion doesn’t impinge on climbing. After we’ve climbed nearly a thousand feet out of the valley, Caroline starts to wonder. A sign stating twenty minutes to the village does nothing to convince her this is a good idea. It will only be a pile of old stones, faint vestiges of a culture long disappeared to time. We make it in seven minutes. The sign must have been in tourist time. 

And there we enter a huge collapsed cave, stalactites hanging from the lip of the ceiling. Small stone huts shaped like hives nestle in the bottom of the cave. It’s a small town right out of the Bronze Age, and we walk slowly in awed silence. 

It’s difficult to peg the Nuraghic culture without falling into broad generalizations simply because they were around for such a long time. It is thought they begin somewhere in the neighborhood of 500,000 to 10,000 B.C. and went through many metamorphoses and conquests before being nearly wiped out by the Romans. To call them hunter/gatherers is correct to a certain extent, but they also grew crops. Wandering through Tiscali I am reminded of what I read about them on a Website. I am also reminded of Camp 4. 

The Nuraghic culture is not classic but “impulsive,” avoiding the perfection and the finished, favoring the lack of harmony and equilibrium, the rough improvisation. The villages have no peculiar planning elements. They’re a sort of blocks irregularly spread, underling a temporary community, not really felt but accepted only for need not for a common interest. This sort of ‘building insularity’ is the result of a strong individualist philosophy of the Nuraghic families and clans.

And so, no doubt, a kinship forms as we walk amongst the ruins. And no doubt they climbed (they had to get here) this beautiful limestone, felt the bite of this moon rock on their hands. We leave the village, walking down the trail wrapped in our own thoughts of a civilization that is lost to time but fully centered in this space. We feel as though we have thread on our own precious and infinitely finite time on this fine planet. The fact that we are mere flecks of highly disposable carbon in time and space offers little comfort. It brings forth a biological urge in me. All told it fills me with a mixture of perpetuation and survival. Or put more aptly, a boneheaded boner. I am passing soon from this life and I must mate with my wife. Pull her into the bush under a 300-year-old oak, and mount her with wild Nuraghic abandon. 

But Alas! She wants, nay, needs to climb. We head down valley then up to the Sùrtana and do a host of climbs before darkness falls. Must say, even with one arm, it’s nearly as good as sex.