So you come to the mines as Spartacus did, one hundred and twenty-two Thracians chained neck to neck, carrying their burning hot chains across the desert all the way from the First Cataract. The twelfth man from the front of the line is Spartacus. He is almost naked, as they all are almost naked, and soon he will be entirely naked. He wears a shred of a loin cloth, and his hair is long and he is bearded, just as every man in the line is long-haired and bearded. His sandals have worn through, but he wears the little that is left of them for what protection it may offer; for though the skin of his feet is a quarter of an inch thick and as tough as leather, it is not enough protection against the burning desert sands.
What is he like, this man Spartacus? He is twenty-three years old as he carries his chain across the desert, but it is not marked on him; for his kind, there is an agelessness of toil, no youth and no manhood and no growing old, but only the agelessness of toil. From head to foot and hair and beard and face, he is covered with the powdery white sand, but underneath the sand his skin is burned brown as his dark, intense eyes, which peer out of his cadaverous face like hateful coals. The brown skin is an adjunct of life for such as he; the white-skinned, yellow-haired slaves of the Northlands cannot work in the mines; the sun fries them and kills them, and they pass away in bitter pain.
Tall or short is hard to say, for men in chains do not walk erect, but the body is whipcord, sun-jerked meat, dry and waterless but not fleshless. For so many generations there was a process of gleaning out, winnowing out, and on the stony hills of Thrace the living was never easy, so that what survived is hard and with a tight clutch on life. The handful of wheat upon which he feeds each day, the flat, hard barley cakes are sucked dry of every shred of sustenance and the body is young enough to sustain itself. The neck is thick and muscular, but there are festering sores where the bronze collar rests. The shoulders are padded with muscle, and so equal are the proportions of the body that the man looks smaller than he is. The face is broad, and because the nose was broken once by the blow of an overseer’s rod, it appears flatter than it actually is, and since the dark eyes are wide-set, it takes on a gentle, sheep-like expression. Under the beard and the dust, the mouth is large and full-lipped, sensuous and sensitive, and if the lips move back—in a grimace, not in a smile—you see that the teeth are white and even. The hands are large and square and as beautiful as some hands can be; indeed, the only thing about him that is beautiful is his hands.
This, then, is Spartacus, the Thracian slave, the son of a slave who was the son of a slave. No man knows his destiny, and the future is not a book to be read, and even the past—when the past is toil and nothing else but toil—can dissolve into a murky bed of various pain. This, then, is Spartacus, who does not know the future and has no cause to remember the past, and it has never occurred to him that those who toil shall ever do other than toil, nor has it occurred to him that there will ever be a time when men do not toil with the lash across their backs.
What does he think of as he plods across the hot sand? Well, it should be known that when men carry a chain, they think of little, of very little, and most of the time it is better not to think of more than when you will eat again, drink again, sleep again. So there are not complex thoughts in the mind of Spartacus or in the minds of any of his Thracian comrades who carry the chain with him. You make men like beasts and they do not think of angels.
But now it is the end of a day and the scene is changing, and men like these clutch at little bits of excitement and change. Spartacus looks up, and there is the black ribbon of the escarpment. There is a geography of slaves, and though they do not know the shape of the seas, the height of the mountains or the course of the rivers, they know well enough of the silver mines of Spain, the gold mines of Arabia, the iron mines of North Africa, the copper mines of the Caucasus and the tin mines of Gaul. There is their own lexicon of horror, their own refuge in knowledge of another place worse than where they are; but worse than the black escarpment of Nubia is nothing in the whole wide world.
Spartacus looks at it; the others look at it, and the whole line halts its plodding, painful motion, and the camels with their burden of water and wheat also halt, even as do the overseers with their whips and their pikes. Everyone looks at the black ribbon of hell. And then the line goes on.
The sun is sinking behind the black rock when they reach it, and it has become blacker, more savage, more ominous. It is the end of the day’s work and the slaves are emerging from the shafts.
“What are they, what are they?” thinks Spartacus.
And the man behind him whispers, “God help me!”
But God will not help him here. God is not here; what would God be doing here? And then Spartacus realizes that these things he sees are not some strange species of the desert, but men like himself and children such as he was once. That is what they are. But the difference in them has been composed from within and from without; and to those forces which shaped them into something other than humankind, there has been an inner response, a fading away of the desire or need to be human. Just see them—see them! The heart of Spartacus, which has become in the process of years like a stone, begins to contract with fear and horror. The wells of pity in him, which he believes to be dried up, are wet again, his dehydrated body is still capable of tears. He looks at them. The whip lays on his back for him to move on, but still he stands and looks at them.
They have been crawling in the shafts, and now when they come out, they still crawl like animals. They have not bathed since they are here, nor will they ever bathe again. Their skins are patchworks of black dust and brown dirt; their hair is long and tangled, and when they are not children, they are bearded. Some are black men and some are white men, but the difference now is so little that one hardly remarks upon it. They all have ugly calluses on knees and elbows, and they are naked, completely naked. Why not? Will clothes keep them alive longer? The mine has only one purpose, to bring profits to the Roman stockholders, and even shreds of dirty cloth cost something.
Yet they wear an article of clothing. Each has upon his neck a bronze or an iron collar, and as they come crawling down the black rock, the overseers snap each collar onto a long chain, and when there are twenty chained together, they plod to their quarters. It must be noted that no one ever escaped from the Nubian mines; no one could escape. A year in these mines, and how can one ever belong to the world of men again? The chain is a symbol more than a need.
Spartacus stares at them and seeks for his own kind, his own race, the humankind, which is race and kind when a man is a slave. “Talk,” he says to himself, “talk to each other.” But they do not talk. They are silent as death. “Smile,” he pleads to himself. But no one smiles.
They carry their tools with them, the iron picks, crowbars and chisels. Many of them have crude lamps strapped onto their heads. The children, skinny as spiders, twitch as they walk and constantly blink at the light. These children never grow up; they are good for two years at the most, after they come to the mines, but there is no other way to follow the gold-bearing stone when the veins narrow and twist. They carry their chains by the Thracians, but they never even turn their heads to look at the newcomers. They have no curiosity. They don’t care.
And Spartacus knows. “In a little while, I will not care,” he says to himself. And this is more frightening than anything else.
Now the slaves go to eat, and the Thracians are taken with them. The rock shelter, which is their barracks, is built against the base of the escarpment itself. It was built a long, long time ago. No one can remember when it was built. It is built of massive slabs of rough-hewn black stone, and there is no light inside, and ventilation only from the opening at each end. It has never been cleaned. The filth of decades has rotted on its floor and hardened on its floor. The overseers never enter the place. If there should be trouble inside, then food and water are withheld; when they have been long enough without food and water, the slaves become docile and crawl out like the animals they are. When someone dies inside, the slaves bring the body out. But sometimes a little child will die deep inside the long barracks, and it will not be noticed and he will not be missed until the corruption of his body reveals him. That is the kind of a place the barracks is.
The slaves go in without their chains. At the entrance, they are unchained and given a wooden bowl of food and a leathern jack of water. The jack contains a little less than a quart of water, and this is their ration twice a day. But two quarts of water a day is not enough to replace what the heat takes in so dry a place, and thus the slaves are subjected to a gradual process of progressive dehydration. If other things do not kill them, sooner or later this destroys their kidneys and when the pain is too bad for them to work, they are driven out to the desert to die.
All these things, Spartacus knows. The knowledge of slaves is his, and the community of slaves is his. He was born into it; he grew in it; he matured in it. He knows the essential secret of slaves. It is a desire—not for pleasure, comfort, food, music, laughter, love, warmth, women or wine, not for any of those things—it is a desire to endure, to survive, simply that and no more, to survive.
He does not know why. There is no reason to this survival, no logic to this survival; but neither is the knowledge an instinct. It is more than an instinct. No animal could survive this way; the pattern for survival is not simple; it is not an easy thing; it is far more complex and thoughtful and difficult than all of the problems faced by people who never confront this one. And there is a reason for it too. It is just that Spartacus does not know the reason.
Now he will survive. He is adapting, flexing, conditioning, acclimatizing, sensitizing; he is a mechanism of profound fluidity and flexibility. His body conserves strength from the freedom of release from the chain. How long he and his comrades carried that chain, across the sea, up the River Nile, across the desert! Weeks and weeks of the chain, and now he is free of it! He is light as a feather, but that found strength must not be wasted. He accepts his water—more water than he has seen in weeks. He will not gulp it and piss it out in waste. He will guard it and sip at it for hours, so that every possible drop of it may sink into the tissues of his body. He takes his food, wheat and barley gruel cooked with dry locusts. Well, there is strength and life in dry locusts, and wheat and barley are the fabric of his flesh. He has eaten worse, and all food must be honored; those who dishonor food, even in thought, become enemies of food, and soon they die.
He walks into the darkness of the barracks, and the fetid wave of rotten smell claws at his senses. But no man dies of a smell, and only fools or free men can afford the luxury of vomiting. He will not waste an ounce of the contents of his stomach in such a fashion. He will not fight this smell; such things cannot be fought. Instead, he will embrace this smell; he will welcome it and let it seep into him and soon it will have no terrors for him.
He walks in the dark, and his feet guide him. His feet are like eyes. He must not trip or fall, for in one hand he carries food and in the other, water. Now he guides over to the stone wall and sits down with his back against it. It is not so bad here. The stone is cool and he has support for his back. He eats and drinks. And all around him are the movements and breathing and chewing of other men and children who do exactly as he does, and within him the expert organs of his body help him and expertly extract what they need from the little food and little water. He picks the last grain of food from his bowl, drinks down what is left, and licks the inside of the wood. He is not conditioned by appetite; food is survival; every small speck and stain of food is survival.
Now the food is eaten, and some of those who have eaten are more content and others give way to despair. Not all despair has vanished from this place; hope may go, but despair clings more stubbornly, and there are groans and tears and sighs, and somewhere there is a wavering scream. And there is even a little talk, and a broken voice which calls,
“Spartacus—where are you?”
“Here, I am here, Thracian,” he answers.
“Here is the Thracian,” another voice says. “Thracian, Thracian.” They are his people, and they gather around him. He feels their hands as they press close to him. Perhaps the other slaves listen, and in any case, they are deeply silent. It is only the due of newcomers in hell. Perhaps those who came here earlier are remembering now what mostly they fear to remember. Some understand the words of the Attic tongue and others don’t. Perhaps somewhere, even, there is a memory of the snow-topped mountains of Thrace, the blessed, blessed coolness, the brooks running through the pine forests and the black goats leaping among the rocks. Who knows what memories persist among the damned people of the black escarpment?
“Thracian,” they call him, and now he feels them on every side, and when he stretches out a hand he feels the face of one of them, all covered with tears. Ah, tears are a waste.
“Where are we, Spartacus, where are we?” one of them whispers.
“We are not lost. We remember how we came.”
“Who will remember us?”
“We are not lost,” he repeats.
“But who will remember us?”
One cannot talk in such a fashion. He is like a father to them. For men twice his years, he is a father in the old tribal way. They are all Thracians, but he is the Thracian. So he chants to them softly, like a father telling a tale to his children:
“As on the beach where churning water broke,
In close array before the western wind,
Churning finely up from the ocean deeps,
And arching as it breaks upon the land,
Its white foam spewing hard and far,
Just so in such array the Danaans moved
Unhesitating to the battle line—”