Wet Stone

by Carneades of Cyrene, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

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I

The block had been three days coming loose. Skymnos had cut the channel round it with the point, a hand deep and a hand wide, and then the row of sockets along the back, eleven of them, a forearm apart, where the bed of the quarry held the stone. Into each socket went two thin plates of iron and between the plates a wedge. Then the sledge, wedge by wedge from the left, and back again from the right, and nothing in between but listening.

He was old for the work. He had been a slave of the house of Diphilos since before Diphilos was born, and he struck the wedges as if he were knocking on eleven doors and expecting no answer from any of them. The boy Myrsilos, who was Diphilos's sister's son and twelve years old, carried water to the men and sat on the spoil heap and counted the strokes, because his uncle had told him that a man who counts knows where he is.

On the third morning, at about the four hundredth stroke, the note of the wedges changed. Skymnos stopped. He put his palm flat on the block, the way a man puts his palm on a horse, and waited, and the stone made a sound like a jar being set down in the next room. Then a crack ran along the back from socket to socket and the block leaned out from the bed the width of a finger and stopped.

"There," said Skymnos, to nobody.

They levered it out with the bars, Skymnos and the two Phrygians, Manes and Tibios, the boy pushing at a bar he could not move, until the block stood clear on its rollers with a gap between it and the face of the quarry wide enough for a man to stand in. It was a good block. It had been ordered by the city: a base for the bronze statue the people of Chios had voted to Hermesianax son of Hermon, gymnasiarch, for his gifts of oil. Four cubits by two by two, of the grey stone with red in it that the quarries above the shore had always given. Three hundred drachmas, delivered to the cart road. The cart was to come the next morning.

The split back of the block was rough and pale with dust. Skymnos took the water skin from the boy, rinsed his mouth, spat, and threw the rest against the stone to lay the dust before he started dressing the edges.

Then he stepped back, and stepped back again, until his heels were against the spoil heap.

The boy looked where he was looking. The water had darkened the grey and brought up the red, and in the red there was a face. It was not the size of a man's face; it was smaller, the size of a child's. There was a brow, low and broad. There were two short horns, or two short marks where horns would be, curling back. There was a nose that was flat and wide, a mouth that was open as if the face were laughing or about to speak, and under the mouth a beard that came to a point. One ear stood out from the side of the head, long and sharp at the top like a goat's.

"Paniskos," said Tibios, who was a Phrygian and had seen little Pans painted on every wine cup he had ever washed.

Manes said nothing. He turned his back on the block and sat down with his face to the sea.

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II

Diphilos came up from the lower working when the boy fetched him. He was a short, broad man with a white scar across one hand from a dropped wedge, and he leased the quarry from the city on a ten-year contract that had six years to run. He did not say anything when he saw the face. He walked to the left of the block and looked, and to the right of it and looked, and then he climbed onto the rollers and looked down on it from above.

By then the sun had got onto the stone, and the water was drying. The red went back into the grey, and the face went with it. From above, Diphilos saw a split surface with some darker marks on it.

"Again," he said.

The boy brought water. Skymnos threw it. The face came up out of the stone as if it had been waiting under the dust.

"Tibios," said Diphilos. "What do you see?"

"The little Pan, master."

"Manes."

Manes did not turn round. "I see the sea, master."

"Skymnos."

"What the boy sees."

"Boy."

"A face," said Myrsilos. "With horns. Laughing."

Diphilos nodded slowly, as if he had been given four measurements and they agreed. Then he did what none of the others had thought of. He went into the gap between the block and the bed, where the quarry face stood freshly split, and he took the skin from the boy and threw what was left in it against the bed.

The bed was the other half of the same split. Whatever ran through the stone ran through both sides of the crack, and the boy, who had not thought of it until he saw it, saw the face come up a second time on the quarry wall: the same brow, the same horns, the same pointed beard, but turned the other way, the ear on the other side, as a face is turned in a bronze mirror.

"So it was not painted on in the night," said Diphilos. He said it the way he would have said so the block is sound. He came out of the gap and wiped his hands on his tunic. "Tibios, you were going down for bread. Go down for bread. Say nothing in the town."

Tibios went down for bread. By the middle of the afternoon there were thirty people at the quarry.

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III

The first to come who mattered was Metrodoros, one of the exegetes of the city, whose office it was to say what was to be done when a thing happened that the laws had not foreseen: an owl in the council chamber, a calf with two heads, blood in a well. He was a tall man with a careful beard, and he came up the path on a mule with a slave walking behind him carrying a stool, and he sat on the stool in front of the block for a long time with his hands on his knees.

The second was Athenagoras the sculptor, who had a workshop by the harbour and said, when anyone let him, that his family had carved marble on Chios since before there was marble carved in Athens. He came up on foot, faster than the mule, with dust to the knees and a leather roll of tools under his arm. He did not sit down.

The third was Kleodamas, who had let the contract for the statue base on behalf of the city and who would pay the three hundred drachmas when the block reached the cart road. He came last, out of breath, and the first thing he did was look at the block's dimensions and the second was look at Diphilos.

Diphilos had the boy keep the stone wet. Myrsilos stood beside it with a jar and a sponge, and whenever the face began to fade he sponged it back, and he discovered that he could make it come and go, like a lamp being covered and uncovered, and that the people watching him drew in their breath each time it came. It made him feel he was doing something forbidden. He did it very carefully.

Metrodoros spoke first. He spoke sitting down, and he did not raise his voice, and the crowd went quiet so that they could hear him.

"Consider where we are," he said. "This hill has given stone to the city for longer than the city has records. The men who cut here have split ten thousand blocks, and each of them has been wetted and looked at, because that is how you see the grain. Has any man here ever seen a face?" He let the silence answer. "Ten thousand blocks, and nothing. Then a block is ordered for a public purpose, a gift voted by the people to a man who gave the people oil, and on the morning it comes out of the hill it shows the face of a god. And not any god. The god of the hills and the herds, who has his caves on this island above every one of our villages; the god of sudden things, of the fear that comes on an army with no cause. He has shown himself in the one place on this hill where we were certain to look.

"Now, someone will say: faces in stone, faces in clouds, faces in the fire, a man sees what he wants to see. But I ask you to look at what you see. Not something like a face that a man must squint to find, but a brow and horns and a beard and an ear, each in its place, and laughing. And it is not on one side of the crack only. It is in the bed as well, reversed, as a seal is reversed in the wax. The stone was sealed with it before any man came up this hill. Who seals a thing and hides it but one who intends that it should one day be opened?

"I do not tell you what the god wants. That is not shown to me yet. I tell you only what is plain to anyone. A sign has been given, at a public work, on a public day. If it is cut away tomorrow by a mason's chisel so that a bronze man may stand on it, we have taken the god's face and put a gymnasiarch's feet on it. I do not think Hermesianax would want that. I do not think the people would. The block should go to the god's cave above Kardamyla, or the face should be cut out whole and set up there, and the city should order another block, and the quarry should be purified before another is cut."

There was a murmur, mostly of agreement, and several people made the small sign against the evil eye. Kleodamas closed his eyes.

Athenagoras waited until it was quiet again. Then he walked to the spoil heap and picked up chips of the same grey stone with red in it, one and then another and then a third, quickly, as a man picks up coins, and came back and held them up to the crowd one after another.

"Wet them," he said to the boy.

The boy wet them.

"This one," said Athenagoras, "is a dog's head. You see the muzzle. The ear. The eye is that dark spot. This one is an old woman with her mouth fallen in. This one is" — he turned it in the light — "a ship under sail, or a man running, I'll leave it to you. I picked them up without looking. You can all go and pick up your own. There are ten thousand faces on that heap, and ten thousand more in the hill, and nobody has seen them because nobody has spent the afternoon sponging them.

"I don't say the god does nothing. I say the stone does this by itself. There is red in this stone the way there is fat in meat, in streaks and knots and veins, running every way, and if you split it anywhere the red will make some shape on the face of the split, because it has to make some shape. And we are made so that out of all the shapes there are, the one we see first is a face. A child sees a face in a knot in the door. A sailor sees one in the rocks of every headland. Of course one of ten thousand splits looks like a face. It would be a marvel if none ever did.

"And why a Pan? Look at it. What the red makes most easily is the beard and the horns, because the veins run in strings and curl at the end, and a beard and horns are strings that curl. If the red made smooth round cheeks and a straight nose, then I would be afraid of it, because that is hard. It makes a Pan because a Pan is what is easy to make out of a mess.

"The exegete says it is too perfect for chance. Come here. Look at the left eye. It's not there. There is a dark stroke where the brow is and nothing under it. Look at the mouth: it isn't open, it ends; the red stops and the grey begins and your mind puts a lip there. I have carved faces all my life, and my father before me, and I tell you, no one who has ever held a chisel would look at this and say that Scopas made it. It is something like a face. It is not a face. Chance comes close, and stops. A man finishes.

"And as for the other side of the crack, the bed, the seal in the wax — of course it's on both sides. It's in the stone, not on it. Split a loaf with a raisin in it and you'll find half a raisin on each half. That's not a sign. That's bread."

There was laughter at that, and a few people who had made the sign against the eye looked at their hands.

Kleodamas did not make a speech. He said, quite loudly, "Or someone took a brush to it last night."

Diphilos looked at him without expression. "Say what you mean."

"I mean the city has agreed three hundred drachmas for a block," said Kleodamas, "and if this becomes a holy stone, the city will be asked for a great deal more than three hundred to buy it from the man who found it, or the man will sell it to the sanctuary instead and we'll need a new block, and someone will be paid to cut that one as well. I don't accuse anyone. I'm saying it's the first thing I'd look for, if I were buying a horse."

The boy felt his face go hot. He looked at his uncle, and his uncle only nodded.

"Then look for it," said Diphilos. "Athenagoras, you've got a point in that roll. Take it where you like."

Athenagoras unrolled his tools, chose a fine point, and, while Metrodoros half rose from his stool in protest, set it against the edge of the beard and struck it lightly with the mallet. A chip the size of a fingernail flew off. Underneath it, wet, the red ran on into the stone.

"Not paint," said Athenagoras. "Not a stain either. It's through."

"And it's on the bed," said Diphilos. "Reversed. You'd have had to paint it on both halves in the dark, a forearm apart, backwards, and know it would come out when they were wetted. Go and look, Kleodamas."

Kleodamas went into the gap and looked, and came out, and said nothing more about brushes.

"Then there is one more thing to look at," said Athenagoras, "and it decides this, if anything can. If this is a face that some god put in the stone, it's a face, and it's a face all the way through. If it's the red doing what red does, it's only a face at this one depth, where the split happened to fall, and a finger deeper it'll be something else. Let me take a finger off the bed. Not the block; Kleodamas hasn't paid for a block with a hole in the corner. The bed. Just there, by the horn."

Metrodoros said, "You will not."

"The bed is mine," said Diphilos, "for six years more." He looked at the exegete, and then at the sky, where the sun had gone over toward the sea. "A finger, off the corner, by the horn. Skymnos will do it. You talk too much while you work."

Skymnos went into the gap with a claw chisel and the boy behind him with the jar. Everyone who could fit crowded to the mouth of the gap, and the ones at the back stood on the spoil heap. The old man took the finger off the corner of the bed in quick short strokes, as if he were peeling it, and blew the dust away, and then the boy wet it.

The horn was gone. Where the horn had been, a finger deeper, the red ran straight up and divided, like a branch, and the brow beneath it was broader and lower, and the ear that had stood out so sharply was now a curl of red that might have been an ear and might have been a lock of hair. The face was still there, if you knew where it had been. It was older. It was not laughing.

"There," said Athenagoras. "A finger, and it's another thing. That's not a god; a god doesn't lose his horns because a man takes off a finger of stone. It's the vein. It goes where it goes."

"A finger," said Metrodoros, "and it is still a face." He had come into the gap; he was closer to the stone than anyone. His voice was very quiet. "You took off the horn, and he is still there. You have shown me that he is not only on the surface. You have shown me that he goes back into the hill. How far? A cubit? To the heart of the hill? You say a finger deeper it is something else. I say a finger deeper it is still him, with a different look, as your own face is different with the light behind it. You came up here to show us that it is nothing, sculptor, and you have shown us a god at two depths instead of one."

Athenagoras opened his mouth, and shut it, and then laughed, not unkindly, and said, "Well. If he's at every depth I'd like to see you find the bit of this hill he isn't in." And Metrodoros said, "So would I," and for a moment the two of them stood side by side in the gap looking at the wet stone, and the boy saw that they were enjoying it, and did not understand why.

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IV

They all went down the hill at dusk, because no one would stay on a quarry in the dark who did not have to. Metrodoros said he would bring the matter before the council in the morning. Kleodamas said the cart would come in the morning in any case, as agreed, and he would be on it. Athenagoras said nothing, but he looked back twice from the path.

Diphilos and Skymnos and the boy slept in the hut at the top of the working, as they did when a block was out. The Phrygians went down to the village.

The boy woke in the night and his uncle was not on his mat. He went out. The moon had not risen; the hut's lamp was gone from its niche. He found his uncle on the rollers beside the block, the lamp set down on the stone, a water jar between his feet. He had wetted the face, and he was holding the lamp low, below the beard, so that the light came up across the surface.

From below, by lamplight, it was not a Pan. The marks that had been horns were heavy brows. The open mouth was shut and drooping, an old man's mouth, the beard was long and full, and the head was bald. It was a different face entirely. It was drunk, or sad. It might have been a Silenus.

His uncle did not look round. "Come here," he said. "Hold this."

The boy held the lamp below, and his uncle went to the other side and looked, and then the boy held it to the side and his uncle looked again, and they did this for a long time, at each angle, in silence, and each time they wetted the stone. Once it was nothing at all. Once, from the right, it was the little Pan again, laughing. At the end his uncle took the lamp back and sat on the rollers.

"Which is it?" said the boy.

His uncle looked at him. Then, as he did when the boy asked him which way a block would split, he gave him the stone to answer.

"You tell me."

The boy thought. "In the day it was a Pan. Tibios saw it and Skymnos saw it, and I did, and you did, and everyone. Athenagoras saw it too, he said so, he only said it was easy. But at night it's someone else. And a finger in, it's someone else too."

"So?"

"So it's — " The boy stopped. He wanted to say so it's nothing, because that was the end of what Athenagoras had said, and he had liked Athenagoras. But that was not what he had seen. "So it's a face. It's always a face. It's just never the same face."

His uncle said, "Hm," and put out the lamp.

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V

In the morning the cart came up the road with two yoke of oxen and Kleodamas sitting next to the driver. Behind it, on foot, came Athenagoras, and behind him, at a distance, on his mule, Metrodoros, and with Metrodoros two members of the council. A dozen others followed out of curiosity.

Metrodoros spoke first again. The council would consider it, he said, at the next assembly. Until then the block should not be touched. The councillors nodded. Kleodamas said that the next assembly was in nineteen days, that the bronze was cast and waiting, and that the people had voted a statue, not a sanctuary. The councillors nodded at that too.

Diphilos let them all finish. Then he went into the hut and came out with the contract.

It was written on two wax tablets bound together with a cord, and it was sealed with the seal of the city and with his own, and it had been witnessed by three citizens, whose names he read out. He read it all out. A block of grey stone of the upper quarry, sound, without cracks or pockets, four cubits by two by two, dressed on five faces to a flat surface, the sixth to be left rough as the bed; to be delivered to the cart road on the twenty-sixth day of the month, which was that day; for three hundred drachmas, one hundred paid at signing and two hundred to be paid on delivery.

"Dressed on five faces," he said. "The face with the Pan on it is one of the five. That's the back of the base. It goes against the wall of the gymnasium. Nobody will ever see it."

"Then nobody will ever see him," said Metrodoros.

"Nobody had ever seen him the day before yesterday," said Diphilos.

Then Diphilos turned to the exegete, and the boy, who knew him, saw that he was choosing what to say with the same care he used to choose where to put the wedges.

"I don't know if he's the god," Diphilos said. "Neither do you. You think he is and Athenagoras thinks he isn't, and yesterday I listened to both of you and each of you was convincing while he was talking. I can't tell you which. I won't tell you he's not the god, because I don't know that. I won't tell you he is, because I don't know that either. But I know what's in this." He held up the tablets. "I know who wrote it and who sealed it and who stood by and saw it sealed, and I've known for four months. I've measured that block four times. It's sound. That's what I know best, so that's what I'll do."

"And if you are wrong?"

"If I'm wrong," said Diphilos, "and he's the god, then he's in the hill, as you said. You saw it yourself: a finger deeper and he was still there. If it's his, he can put it in the next one."

There was a silence. Then one of the councillors, an old man with a voice like a gravel cart, began to laugh, and the other one tried not to and failed, and Athenagoras put his hand over his face. Metrodoros did not laugh. He looked at Diphilos for a long time, and then at the block, and then he got back on his mule.

"I will tell the council what was said," he said. "All of it."

"Tell them it's sound," said Diphilos.

Skymnos dressed the back of the block that morning, with the claw and then with the flat chisel, taking off two fingers to get it true. The boy wetted it when he was told to, after each pass, to show the old man where the high places were. At the first pass the Pan was a Silenus. At the second it was a smear of red, like wine spilt on a floor, with something like an eye in it, and then the old man went over it with the flat and it was a smooth grey surface with some red in it, as good a back as any base in the city. They rolled it down onto the cart, and the oxen took it away.

Athenagoras stayed behind after the cart had gone. He went into the gap and looked at the bed, the mirror face, with the corner off it where the horn had been. Then he came out and asked Diphilos what he would take for the bed.

"It's not for sale," said Diphilos. "It's the next block."

"You'll cut it up."

"Next month."

Athenagoras nodded as if he had expected it. Before he went down, he bent and picked up something from the dust beside the rollers and turned it over in his fingers, and the boy saw that it was the chip he had struck off the edge of the beard to test for paint. He held it a moment. Then he gave it to the boy.

"Keep it," he said. "That's all of him there'll be."

They began the channel for the next block on the first day of the following month. Skymnos threw water on the bed before he made the first cut, as he did every time, to see the grain. Manes, who had worked beside the bed every day since without once looking at it, looked. The boy looked. The face was there, with its horn gone, turned the wrong way, older; and then Skymnos set the point against the place where the brow had been and drove it in.

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VI

Twenty-three years later Myrsilos son of Hippon, a mason, was in Athens cutting column drums for the long two-storeyed stoa that the king of Pergamon was paying for on the east side of the agora. The drums were Pentelic, white and close-grained, and when you wetted them there was nothing to see.

On the last day of the month, when the overseers paid off the Chian gang, a man from the gang who had been to school as a boy said that the head of the Academy was still teaching, a very old man with a voice that could be heard across a field, and that anyone could stand at the back and listen. Myrsilos had nothing else to do. He walked out through the Dipylon and along the road, past the graves, to the garden.

There were perhaps forty young men there under the plane trees, and older men at the edges, and one old man on a bench in the middle. He was not tall. His beard and hair were long and uncut, and he did not look at anyone, but when he spoke Myrsilos, at the very back, could hear every word as if it were said into his ear.

"Very well," said the old man. "Let us suppose a case. Suppose that in the quarries of the Chians a stone is split, and on the face of the split there stands out the head of a little Pan. Horns. A beard. Laughing.

"Here is the argument that this is a sign, and I will make it as well as it can be made." And he made it, and it was Metrodoros's argument, and it was better than Metrodoros had made it: the ten thousand blocks, the public work, the seal in the wax. The young men nodded.

"Now here is the argument that it is chance, and I will make that as well as it can be made." And he made that, and it was Athenagoras's, and it was better too: the faces on the spoil heap, the raisin in the loaf, the left eye that is not there. "No sculptor who saw it," said the old man, "would say that Scopas had made it. Chance comes close, and stops." The young men laughed, and nodded again.

"You see what has happened," said the old man. "You nodded twice."

A young man near the front, with a tablet on his knee, said, "But master, which is it?"

"Which do you think?"

"I think it is chance."

"Why?"

The young man began to answer and the old man took his answer apart, gently, with the exegete's argument about the bed, and then the young man said that then perhaps it was a sign, and the old man took that apart with the argument about the depth. The others were enjoying it. The young man with the tablet flushed, and laughed, and wrote something down.

Another young man said, "Did it happen? The quarry? The Pan?"

The old man turned his head toward the voice. "Does it matter to the argument?"

"I should like to know."

"So should I," said the old man. "I was not on Chios. You may write down that I supposed it." And the young man with the tablet wrote it down.

Myrsilos stood at the back with his hand in the pouch at his belt, where he had kept the chip from the edge of the beard for twenty-three years. He did not say anything. He was a mason; they were gentlemen; and he had not, in any case, been asked.

When it was over and they had gone, he walked to the fountain at the gate of the garden and held the chip under the water until it was dark and wet, and turned it in his fingers in the late light. It was a small grey stone with a thread of red in it, curling at the end. It might have been a beard. He looked at it for a while. Then he put it back in the pouch and walked back along the road to the city.

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THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Novembribus (1 November 2026), ā Carneade Cyrēnaicō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Carneades of Cyrene, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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