John Masters

Coming in low from due east, looking through the curved perspex, it appears first as a pale cloud on the surface of the sea off the mountains of Africa. The edges fast become more sharply defined, and the whiteness intensifies as the morning sun strikes back from it. Darker areas, but still quite pale, take form to left and right of the central white, and the sky beyond silhouettes the shape of the crest. It is a great wall of rock, over 2 miles long, 1400 feet high at right and center. It falls gradually to the left—south—and seems to be a gigantic crouching animal, its head toward Africa, its paws extended. Northward the resemblance ends, for there are no hind quarters or tail: the rock ends sheer.

There is a huge straight-sided patch in the middle of the eastern slope, as pale in itself as the gray of the cliffs but appearing brighter from its smoothness, which more strongly casts back the sun's light. It is manmade, the huge patch, perhaps half a mile long and 700 feet high; but who knows what it is? There is nothing else like it on earth.

Closer now: parts of the wall are thinly painted in green—a few broad daubs run down gullies, a fine stippling marks ledges, crevices, gentler slopes where soil can stay and plants take hold. Along the shoreline the dark mouths of caverns appear, some small, most large. The outer arch often shelters a lesser inner arch and that a lesser again, thus gradually bringing the eye from the colossal to the human scale, in the manner used by the architect of the Buland Darwaza at Fatehpur Sikri.

The up thrust rock is sliding past on the right, and the works of man command the eye. The crest bristles like a threatened porcupine. Guns, masts, directors, radar towers, range finders, antennae, guns ... guns ... guns ... scattered large buildings toward the low point of the rock—not houses, but barracks or hospitals, or prisons perhaps ... on the very point, a white and red lighthouse. Turning north, the barracks give way to houses; the houses close in on each other; trees, gardens, streets cling in parallel rows to this western slope. It is more gentle than the almost sheer eastern wall but still very steep for a town. Directly below now a big harbor opens up—long sea walls, gray warships alongside, dry docks: more sea moles —yachts, oil tankers, cargo ships: The houses condense rapidly into suburbs, the suburbs become a narrow, huddled town. Momentarily, a four-square medieval castle appears on a bluff above the town. Below it, half hidden, half ruined, there are the regular zigzags of fortifications, more walls, embrasures for cannon.

The landing pad drifts up to the wheels. On the right the sheer cliff which we had once seen as the back of the crouching lion begins to take on a familiar shape. Everyone knows it, for everyone has seen it in advertisements, and by now it is not only a place but a byword. The name evokes a geographical location, a habitation, a fortress, yes—but equally, an idea, an attitude, an attribute.

It is the Rock: Gibraltar.

Everyone knows it, but only in part, because although it is small in area, it is big in story. No place in the world has witnessed, and played a part in, so much history. It is a history not only of battles and sieges, of that defiance and resistance for which the name has come to stand, but of mankind's climb from the caves—these very caves—to the technological heights exemplified in the artifacts arrayed along this very crest. It is a story of man exploring the world and himself, of building civilizations and casting them down, of the long, eventful journey to the miracles and malaises of today. The Rock has seen it all.

It is a story of immense length and complexity, with two special problems. The first is the lack of human continuity. Except for prehistoric peoples and occasional later visitors, the Rock was uninhabited until medieval times, and since then there have been four complete turnovers of population. But except for one break, and that very short in Gibraltar's time scale, one people has always been represented here: the Jews; and it is they who provide the continuity. This is not the story of Gibraltar as seen through Jewish eyes, still less a history of the Jews of Gibraltar; but as in actual history, Jewish characters and the Jewish character—so aptly similar to the attributes of the Rock—link what would otherwise have no human connection.

The second problem is that of uneven depth, caused by the fact that much is known of some parts of Gibraltar's history, little of others; yet the importance of an event and the realness, the humanity, of the people involved in it should not be lessened by our ignorance. The two-stream plan on which this book is written has been designed to overcome this drawback.

Back then, not this time in a helicopter, nor to east or west or north or south—but back in time, to the beginnings....

As the Earth continued to cool, it shrank. The crust had to adjust to the new smaller size and did so by folding. The folds did not take place evenly but where the crust was thin, weak, or unusually depressed. The western Mediterranean was such an area. It is bounded by a huge circle of solid masses of igneous rock: the Spanish tableland, the Massif Central of France, the main body of North Africa. The shrinking pressure forced the earth's crust to fold up here. Inside the resistant shield behind, new mountains were formed—steep, high, dramatic, quite different from the rounded igneous hills of the containing circle. The new mountains were the Atlas, the Apennines, the Alps, the Pyrenees, and the Sierra Nevada.

At a bend in this new fold (here running north to south) appeared a special phenomenon. The surface here, the substance being folded by the pressures of the earth's shrinkage, was limestone, thousands of feet thick. On top of the limestone lay a thin deposit of shale and grit. Limestone is not cloth, and when the folding reached a certain point, it split. It might have cracked in any number of ways, but it actually split in two places: one in the top center of the fold and one halfway down the western side. The unbelievable pressure continued. The central wedge of limestone continued to thrust upward, breaking the weak tension of the shale, pushing on up, baring a vertical face scores—hundreds—thousands of feet high. The outer parts of the original fold subsided, one almost completely, the other saving itself by leaning against the towering center.

The shale, which had been lying on a fairly flat surface far below the sea, now found itself clinging to exposed and sharply tilted slopes. Wind, rain, and the upheavals of adjustment to the new form washed the shale off the steeper parts of the limestone and collected it in the hollows. Gibraltar had come into existence.

The process of settling took a long time. During these eons the earth sank and rose and the seas advanced and retreated several times, to immense heights and depths. About 12,000,000 years ago other passages between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean closed, and the earth sank south of Gibraltar. The waters passing through this strait survived as the only link between the two oceans. The Rock guarded the north side of the new channel, looking very much as it does now—its steep white faces, of pure limestone, toward the north and east, its sloping and duller aspects, of shale, toward the south and west. It was 2-3/4 miles long by three-quarters of a mile wide at the widest place and was joined to the mainland on the north by a sandy isthmus about a mile long and gradually increasing from half a mile to a full mile wide where the mainland proper begins. The west side of the isthmus curves gently round in a full semicircle 4 miles in diameter. Two rivers flow into this bay from the land behind, which quickly rises and fades to distant mountains. On the east side of the isthmus the shoreline continues almost due north, curving only very gradually toward the northeast. South, the jagged African shore is 11-1/2 miles away, and the mountains on that side are higher than Gibraltar. Southwest, through the strait, the Atlantic ocean forms the horizon.

Limestone is a clean, hard, pale gray rock, formed mainly of calcium carbonate. It dissolves slowly under the action of water, especially if the water carries acids or alkalis. As soon as the mass of the Rock was raised and exposed, water began to eat into it. Rainwater, falling into cracks, enlarged them into clefts, then into "vertical" caves. Seawater tunneled into the foot of the cliffs to make "horizontal" caves at all levels, for during the settling period there were many sea levels (one sea-made cave is 700 feet above the present shore).

The sheer energy of the years created tunnels, halls, passages, rooms, cells, and amphitheaters inside the Rock. And the chemical action of the water not only excavated the caves, it decorated them. As water comes out of the interior of the rock, where it has been under pressure, and enters a cave, it must give up some of the calcium carbonate with which it has been supercharged. A tiny deposit of sinter-limestone is made, and according to the other substances through which the water has flowed —e.g., iron, carbon, shell layers—or the acids which have been added to it, the deposit will have color, a limitless variety of colors, though all muted in intensity and tone. Limitless, too, are the other forces which will shape and sculpture the accumulating deposits: how the wind blows, whether the roof is flat or sloping, whether the water drips regularly or irregularly, fast or slow....

Doubly limitless, then, are these formations of sinter-limestone in the caves—stalagmites rising from the ground, stalactites hanging from the roof, pillars, knobs, warts, candles, palettes, tree trunks, water lilies, straws, frills, flounces, curtains, tracery, leaves, cathedral arches and hammer beams, people, animals ... in white, tan, rust red, blue, gray. Three of the most extraordinary forms are helectites (crazy worm casts shaped by wind action, which seem to defy all laws of gravity and reason); cave pearls, or pitholite (formed when the steady dripping of the water keeps rolling the sinter deposit around as it forms); and rimstone (thin ledges around the rim of pools and lakes, or even right over them).

The floor of the caves, if it is not "live" sinter—that is, still being formed—is an extraordinary dark brown powder, like snuff, of the consistency of fine flour. This is the deposit of millions of years of vegetable mold and, in some caves, of bat guano. It is often many feet thick.

About three quarters of a million years ago the Ice Ages began to modify the Rock into its present exact form. Each ice age lasted at least 40,000 years, and the warmer gap between them, the interglacial periods, were generally longer.

In each ice age the north polar ice cap spread much farther south than it does now. During one it covered England solid; France was uninhabitable and Gibraltar very cold. Because so much water was locked up in the ice the sea level fell: at Gibraltar it was some 300 feet below its present level.

During the interglacials the climate was much warmer than it is now. England became tropical and Gibraltar equatorial; the sea level rose to 300 feet above the present; and the loss of the weight of the ice actually caused those areas that had been under it to rise, while bordering areas, such as Spain, sank in compensation, raising the sea level there still higher.

At each of these levels—and every ice age and every interglacial had different ones—the sea made beaches, sea cliffs, and sea caves. Some are now submerged; others are stranded far above the shore but quite recognizable for what they were.

The ice ages also continued the work of previous eons in sculpting the Rock. Ice and frost action broke off pieces of sharp-angled limestone, which rolled to the foot of the slope and were cemented together by the action of the charged water to form the limestone breccia which covers most of the lower part of the Rock. Mixed into it, and also sometimes in considerable depth in and above the shale deposits, is bone breccia, presumably from the victims of carnivorous animals.

Finally, there is sand. A large part of the eastern face of the Rock is covered by a gigantic and very steep slope of aeolian (windblown) sand. This sand—some of it cemented by the usual action—was formed in the ice ages, when for thousands of years without cease a strong east wind blew sand from the exposed floor of the Mediterranean onto the Rock.

When the last ice age ended, the east wind created another special feature of Gibraltar's climate, the
levanter
cloud. Coming across hundreds of miles of Mediterranean, it is always charged with water. When it meets the steep east face, it has to rise 1,400 feet very rapidly. It cools, and some of its water condenses to form vaporous cloud, which often hangs oppressively over the top of the Rock, also streaming out to the west, while the sky over mainland, bay, and strait is quite clear. For the rest, the climate is equable, temperately warm, and—except with a levanter—pleasant. The rainfall, concentrated mainly between September and March, is adequate.

When the land took its present shape, Gibraltar stood at the gate of the only channel linking the Mediterranean with the Atlantic. The surface current formed: strongly eastward in the center of the strait, less so at the sides. For thousands of years no one knew how the Atlantic water pouring into the Mediterranean returned. Then in the last century British naval surveys found an equally strong underwater current, perpetually westbound, which carried huge amounts of water over the sill of the strait into the Atlantic. The configuration of the ocean bed causes much of this great river to come to the surface off Cape Trafalgar, increasing the already great danger of that cape for small vessels, especially in the days of primitive navigation by sail and oar. (These discoveries solved some legendary sea mysteries, notably that of a ship sunk in collision off Tarifa about 1805. She sank in a riproaring eastbound current—and came to the surface the next day off Trafalgar, 30 miles to the west.)

The fish that inhabited these waters were, first, the tunny. The ancients believed that tunny perpetually circled the Mediterranean in a counterclockwise direction, since they had only one good eye, the right. Modem pollution, the increase in fishing, and the noise of ships' engines have driven tunny away from the immediate neighborhood of the strait. Beside tunny there are or were whale, swordfish, squid, eel, bonito, sardine, sea bream, sea bass, red mullet, perch, pollack, and gilthead.

As the land took shape, the vegetation settled on and in it. The Rock is too steep, and the surface soil too shallow or scattered over the limestone, for the vegetation ever to have been lush; but neither was it ever wholly barren. Now, its climate median between the extremes it has known, the pale limestone is overlaid with a thin-woven carpet of scrub, mainly aromatic—heather, rosemary, sage, Sodom apple, thyme, lavender, pennyroyal. In the scrub stand steeply tilted thickets, woods, or isolated trees—cork oak, carob bean, holly oak, wild olive, wild fig.

The flowers do not lie in great banks like cowslips in an English meadow, for there is no rich loam to make the bed for them. Instead they line the edges of runnels, shelter in small crevices, or hang onto tiny patches of earth exposed to the wind, high on the cliffs. Every month of the year some flowers are cautiously displaying their blossoms —clematis, narcissus, mesembryanthemum, stonecrop, ragwort, oxalis, bindweed, mignonette, borage, asphodel, marigold, autumn crocus, periwinkle, bee orchid, snapdragon, rue, mallow, gladiolus, giant leaved acanthus. In March three score varieties flower, stippling the whole Rock with color—white and yellow of chrysanthemum, jasmine, coronilla, broom, sea aster, giant fennel, freesia, campion; blue of iris, bugloss, pimpernel, scilla, wild pea; rose and pink of mallow, cistus, snapdragon; and a flower that, in Europe, exists only here—the flat white and mauve, many-petaled faces of Gibraltar candytuft.

The birds came and are as various as the flowers but in the main not as noticeable—warblers, finches, tits, wrens, orioles, choughs, jays, ravens, kestrels, buzzards, vultures, ospreys, gannets, puffins; and, as with the candytuft, one bird that in Europe is unique to Gibraltar—the Barbary partridge. It is about twelve inches long, so is a little smaller than the redlegged partridge. It is studded with small white spots, has a chestnut collar and a metallic blue tinge in the wing coverts, and its legs are red or pale buff. It is a noisy, unsuspecting bird, much hunted by cats, eagles, lizards, and snakes.

After the vegetation and the birds, the animals.... They came early and lived through the fluctuations and upheavals of the Rock's formation. Bone breccia of animals was being deposited in some of the rock fissures before the great submergences of more than 30,000,000 years ago. By such traces as this breccia and the bones deep under the present cave floors, we know that the wolf came, and the fox, seal, ibex, and chamois; all the animals that have since been domesticated—horse, pig, and cattle (including the aurochs); rabbit, rat, water rat—and two kinds of rhinoceros; tortoise, bat, gecko, and leopard. Most of these lived on the Rock for as long as the species existed in Europe, though there can never have been large numbers here, and the bigger, more noticeable animals soon vanished at the arrival of the last corner—man.

In remote geological times various land bridges existed for millions of years between Europe and Africa. One such bridge was certainly at Gibraltar, which saw some of man's ancestors pass in both directions, "African" types going to Europe and "European" types to Africa.

At some time more—perhaps much more—than 50,000 years ago, a type of man flourished in Europe, including the Rock, who represented the biggest advance in evolution thus far. He was big and burly and stood upright, with his heavy head thrust a little forward. His face had a marked frontal bone, eyes deep sunk under it, and a wide flat nose, but he was definitely a human, not an ape. He had developed only the simplest tools and lived by hunting deer, ibex, rabbits, and water birds and by gathering shellfish, nuts, and fruit. He may also, from need or for ritual reasons, have been a cannibal, but probably seldom inside his own family group.

As he had no pots, he could neither store food nor cook it, except by grilling over an open flame. The climate was colder than ours during most of his stay, but not greatly so. With the sea bed lower all around the Rock, those who lived here had a wider terrain in which to hunt, and the seashore was more easy to get at for shells and fishing in the rock pools. Two or three hundred feet above the sea and about a mile back from it there were many high-arched, deep caves at the foot of the huge cliffs. The cliffs gave good protection, and in these caves the people lived. In the same cave or a neighboring one they buried their dead with ceremonies and artifacts, proving that they had some non-instinctive beliefs about the nature of death and hence of life.