A Small Wave in the Sea - Dark Mountain

There are whales in the Sahara Desert, at Wadi al-Hitan in Egypt, ruins of bleached bones shipwrecked and stripped in the dry wind. Three of the whales are Basilosaurids, extinct ancestor of the modern-day whales that pitch the horizon of our blue world. The Greek origin of its name speaks to the serpentine form of its skeleton – basileus, from king, and sauros, from lizard. The lizard king of a barren sea, its vestigial remains are disinterred as sandstone breaks down and becomes desert. The whale bones are relics of the past that meet with the present in constellation, a flash of ancestry burning through rock and sand.

The coexistence of life and death is apparent in Egypt, where reverence is paid to the rising and setting of the sun, the flooding of the Nile, the diurnal rebirth of lotus flowers. When I visited the Valley of the Kings and Queens on the west bank of Luxor, I found gold-embellished tomb walls shrinking deep into the mountainside and vanishing to eternal darkness. The entrances were subtle and the geometry uncomplicated, laid out to represent the sun’s nightly journey – yet only a light carried down from the world of the living animated the façades, gilded renditions of the past in shattered fragments. Time dripped through the heavy layers of rock, slowing down to timelessness as it escaped the thin surface of the world. Whenever time seems to stand still, I suspect that we are getting a sense of its true expansiveness, the way in which it saturates everything.

Tomb in the Valley of the Kings, 1888. Archivio fotografico, Museo Egizio, Turin.

Modern thinkers often perceive time in linear sequences. Geologists and archaeologists consider it in layers, but the builders of the tombs in Luxor likely worked by ancient concepts of time and eternity, neheh and djet, the former as time in constant motion and the latter representing completeness. The rolling wave, and the infinite ocean which surrounds it.

Palaeontologists dig between strata of sandstone at Wadi al-Hitan and translate them as millennia settled and compacted in neatly filed geological records. Evolutionary biologists strive to interpret time in branching diagrams adhering to strict chronologies. In these schematic charts, humans and whales share a common ancestor, a small shrew-like creature that existed around 180 million years ago. It was at that point that our lineages branched into separate fissures of descent, our genetic stories departing one another but remaining entangled through a shared ancestry more complex than any diagram might represent. Humans and whales intertwine through biblical, industrial, and metaphorical associations.

The scientific family of whales, cetaceans, derives from the Latin cetus, or the Greek ketos, a name used to describe the sea monster defeated by Andromeda and Perseus. The ketos was often depicted as a massive snake, or the head of a land animal on the body of a fish. The purple whale known as Porphyrios terrorized the city of Byzantion for half a century, until it was stranded in mud while chasing a pod of dolphins, dragged ashore and killed. Pliny the Elder describes an orca in the city of Ostia during the reign of Claudius, who ordered a barrier of nets across the harbour and set out in person to attack the stranded creature with the praetorian cohorts. The terror of whales in these stories translates an illiterate relationship between humans and the sea. The hero often makes a monster of his fears, asserting power over the Earth in battle with its most colossal living emissary.

Whales themselves have vast social and cultural spaces, horizontal and vertical, spanning oceans and generations. Ancestral knowledge about migration and hunting is passed from mother to calf. Since 2020, killer whales in the Strait of Gibraltar have been ramming yachts and breaking off rudders, a practise that might have been taught to young whales by an elder matriarch in revenge for an injury she sustained from a boat. Killer whales in Puget Sound recently started wearing salmon on their heads, a fashion first observed in the 1980s.

Whales lack such inscriptions and monuments as those on the fertile banks of the Nile, depending on oral traditions to pass on knowledge. Bowhead whales off Alaska sing different songs to those near Greenland and killer whales south of Vancouver Island greet each other differently from those to the north. These customs, defined as ‘behaviours’ by scientists, might represent kinds of ritual similar to those with which human societies share ancestral knowledge and lifeways across generations.

Whales lack such inscriptions and monuments as those on the fertile banks of the Nile, depending on oral traditions to pass on knowledge.

The largest skeleton at Wadi al-Hitan is over 20 metres long, its vertebrae arcing from five-fingered flippers to hind legs with feet and toes, an evolutionary intermediary between land and sea. The tail flukes of modern whales swim up and down, unlike the side-to-side movements of the fishes, because of the walking heritage of their backbones. And these are not the only creatures entombed in the desert. There is a dolphin ancestor, Dorudon atrax, three species of early sirenian (sea-cows), sharks, crocodiles, sawfish, rays, turtles and a sea snake.

There are plant fossils preserved like thin slivers of pressed lotus flowers. There are seagrasses and mangroves, coastal species that suggest the sea was shallow and probably a nursery for young creatures. Those plants, now flattened to inky films, once sustained the great whales that roamed here on fin and foot. Each living being that occupied a space in the natural history of our planet has shaped it in some small way, an ancestral echo that invites harmony between life and death in the way that dreams blur sleeping and waking.

The obscurity of these binaries are similar to how decay affects our perception of death. When a whale dies it drifts to the shore or sinks to the sunless depths. It becomes a bony reef that blooms in the benthos. Much as a fallen tree is a life source for critters and fungi, ‘whale falls’ become complex localised ecosystems for decades. Hagfish tear and burrow through blubbery flesh with sleeper sharks, chemosynthetic bacteria break down lipids and osedox worms suck on bone marrow.

Creatures of the dark make entire worlds around whale skeletons – energy is exchanged in continuous spiralling pathways that intersect across space and time. The whales at Wadi al-Hitan lay in the depths of the prehistoric Tethys Sea which receded and exposed them as the land masses of our planet shifted and the seas remade themselves on timescales that rewrite our ideas of what it means to be fluid. The energy with which the whales swam persists, whispering up clouds of bioluminescence, skimming the dark gyres and braiding the sea with stars.

Paying attention to our deep ancestral connections can offer a relationship based on ‘response(ability)’, what Donna Haraway describes as an opportunity to engage deeply with the world, which both holds us to account and creates a sense of belonging in the landscapes and seascapes which surround us. The ocean is a space full of liminality, where the boundary between spaces and bodies are uncertain, where dinoflagellates and radiolarians drift among molecules of water, diatoms and faeces, whales and fishes. It is a smooth aqueous body in which the self is dissolved into many selves joined through the continuity of lines of becoming, made up of heterogenous elements that are always about to change state. It initiates what Iris Murdoch refers to as a process of ‘unselfing’, taking self-forgetful delight in the existence of other beings, dropping insistence on knowing – ‘not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystical’.

This is why the stories we tell of our ancestors are so important. They break down the boundaries between self, other and space, entering a zone of proximity where an ethics might arise that helps guide us through a crisis of detachment from the fullness of the world. Among other things, it is a wicked individualism that now eats through the beating heart of our multifarious world, and recognising our ancestry allows us to see the self as neheh, a small wave in the wide sea of djet, part of the motion of eternity.

The Atlantic near Tramore Strand, Ireland. Photo: Alexander McMaster.

The northwest of Ireland is where I am most deeply connected with the land and sea, in particular a beach called Tramore Strand where I find myself at home among the pebbles and stinging spray and the pink sea thrifts. This is where I first saw a whale, its slumped carcass wilting on the sand. The few moments that I have since encountered whales alive have been glimmers, hints at their existence in a sleek grey back or a smooth puff of air.

The path to Tramore passes through wind-shorn pines and over dunes where Neolithic people dug souterrains and cast seashells in middens near dolmen stones that mark their tombs. There is a stone circle that draws you in and then warns you away at the last moment, a thin place between the worlds of the living and the dead. I have often found bones on Tramore, the skeletons of seals and dolphins rattling on the edge of the tide.

I was schooled to engage with the land and sea as though I were detached from them. This winter on Tramore I have practiced giving attention to stones and shells and bones, hopeful that I might learn something of my own ancestry and the wider ecology of which it is a part. The landscape is scattered with ancient monuments, not only the stones and tombs, but the rockpools and the dunes that disperse broken limpet shells on the sand.

There is a tendency to see the systems of human representation as complete, to dismiss the unsaid and unseen, but we are not the only species capable of world-making.

The difficulty with understanding ancestry in Ireland is in part the imposition of a narrow form of religious instruction that has washed out our connection with the Tuatha Dé Dannan, the Milesians, the Druids and even the early Christian saints. The same ideological sedimentation lies at the root of our ecological crises, a myth of human domination that drives us apart from the whales and the gannets, the limpets that cling to the shore and the hares that skip amongst the standing stones. There is a tendency to see the systems of human representation as complete, to dismiss the unsaid and unseen, but we are not the only species capable of world-making.

The Irish poet and theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama calls on us to ‘pick up the stones over which we stumble and build altars’. The voices of our ancestors are inherent in our bones and our landscape and we can listen for what is still within and beyond ourselves. Response(ability) and the work of remembering go hand in hand, a softening to the memory of the landscapes and seascapes and the bones they carry in their strata. It is a process of unselfing and learning to inhabit these places in moments of world-making with others. The ancestral wisdom of the sea is held in stones and shells, in the whelks that nest themselves in granite and the whales that fall into the depths to become constellations of fossils.

I have spent winter in the northwest of Ireland and at the solstice I find myself standing in the sea at Tramore, a small wave immersed in the cold Atlantic, trembling amongst seal bones and limpet shells and the ancestral memories of whales that once swam over a desert.