Color: A Natural History of the Palette (44 page)

In the morning we had only an hour and a half to walk. A few turns before the mine, we had to cross a stream of snow melt, and suddenly I stopped in delight. For as far back along the side valley as I could see, the white rocks were flecked gloriously with blue. I stood in the icy water for as long as I could, enjoying the colored rocks shimmering in the early morning sun around me. It answered my question about how the Bronze Age people discovered the mine in the first place: it would have been easy; all they had to do was follow the colored stones. Once upon a time this whole side valley would have been a blue rock garden, just waiting for people to enjoy it. And when they found out its value, hundreds of people arrived to do exactly that. Miners built Sar-e-sang village seven millennia ago, and walking up through it, I wondered how much it had changed. It had the feeling of a cowboy town: one dusty street full of small shops and the rest of the place a jumble of mud houses linked by paths covered with horse droppings. Afghan women were not allowed there—the government thought that families would be a distraction to the miners—and so I was the first female to have visited in six months or so. Enjoy this, I thought to myself: never again would I be the subject of such admiring attention from so many.

We drank tea while Yaqoub showed us examples of grade-one lapis lazuli. There are three main colors, he said, although to us at first it all looked much the same and we pored, confused, over the similar rocks. “The best time to assess the stone is sunrise or sunset,” Yaqoub said helpfully. “When the rays of the sun lie flat upon your hand: then you can see the color.” The most common is
rang-i-ob
, which means simply “color of water” and is a general word for blue. This stone is the darkest, the shade that sea goes when there is nothing but deep sea beneath it; no sand, no land, just water. The second is
rang-i-sabz
or green. I couldn’t tell the difference between that and
ob
: it was only when I saw polished stones two weeks later in Pakistan that I could see the green; they looked as if shreds of bright lettuce had got caught in the teeth of the blue.

But the greatest of the three is the extraordinarily named
surpar
, or “red feather.” It was puzzling and beautiful that the best blue should be described as red. It was an ex-miner who gave the most poetic explanation. “It is the color of the deepest moment of the fire,” he said. “The very heart of the flame.” I thought at first I couldn’t tell it from the other colors, but I found that if I felt particularly drawn to any one of the uneven lumps of stone, it always turned out to be
surpar
. It has a compelling violet tinge to it, as a blue glass vessel sometimes has when you drink toward the light. It is hard to know, because Western art historians do not distinguish between the types, but I believe
surpar
stones would have made that extraordinary blue of Titian’s sky.

An explosion suddenly ricocheted around the mountain. Nobody flinched as they might do in the rest of the country: it was just the miners using dynamite, looking for a vein to bleed. That afternoon we would go up to the mine, Yaquob Khan promised. But first there was time for a warm bath: or at least a heated bucket in a dark bathroom. This was where Commander Massood bathed when he visited Sar-e-sang, Abdullah said. The commander would order six buckets of hot water, and stay there for four hours. When I emerged after half an hour I found that my boot could not be mended. There was no glue in town and this particular brand was too tough to be sewn. Too tough to be sewn, not too tough to collapse, I thought, as Abdullah and Yaquob Khan tied me into the hated shoe with nylon string.

It needed to be strong—these were tough paths. We ascended slowly, with our feet constantly slipping down the gray shale. Mine No. 1 was the closest to the town; No. 4, the one with traditionally the best lapis (although like all the others it had none at the moment), would have taken us two or three hours more. And No. 23, the last one, was much farther away than that. Getting to No. 1 was an energetic enough trek for me. “The BBC were here a couple of years ago,” said Abdullah, who had been their interpreter. “But they took hours to get up the hill: longer than you,” he encouraged. My scarf had slipped and I hadn’t noticed, I was panting so much. A boy appeared, bounding over the rocks and hardly seeming to notice the 25-kilo can of water that he carried on his back. We lightened his load a little, and he sped ahead.

And then, suddenly, we turned a corner, and we were there at the place I had wanted to see for so long. The opening was about three meters high and wide, and all around it were men sitting precariously on high rocks, waiting for us and waving us welcome. By the time we got there, a large pot of green tea had been brewed. We drank it sitting on rugs in a huge cavern lit by candles, while the men gathered round. The ceiling above us sparkled with pyrite stars, and I wondered for how many thousands of years people had lit fires under them and talked. There had been no good stones found for three months, they said. Why? “Because we don’t have the equipment,” said the engineers. We could understand why one mine or two or even fifteen might dry up at the same time. But not why all twenty-three should have done so. I remembered back to that conversation in Kabul a year ago, where I was told about the folk rumor that lapis lazuli destested repressive regimes. But if the men had their theories, they weren’t going to share them.

The shafts are about 250 meters long and dug horizontally into the mountain. Or at least they are sort of horizontal: as we walked along, sometimes upright, sometimes stooped, the floor would dip down dramatically and a miner would shout a warning and hold up his hurricane lamp. Today they drill holes in the rock, and dynamite the stones out. In the past, miners used to light fires under the rock, and then they would throw icy water over it—carried from the river by the predecessors of the fit young boy who had brought up the tea water for us. Shocked by the temperature extremes, the rock would crack and the miners would uncover the lapis. The first few hundred meters of the shaft were blackened with soot from fires lit a hundred years ago: then the whole place would have been perfumed with the scent of burning furze.

As we walked, I imagined where the rock from each section might have found its ultimate resting place. The first 20 meters would have given the stones to Egyptian tombs; a little later was where the Bamiyan Buddhas got their haloes. Early on in the blackened section was a little side passage, the contents of which may have gone to Armenia for twelfth-century illuminated Bibles. A few steps later was where Titian may have got his sky from, and where Michelangelo didn’t get his robe; farther on was Hogarth’s blue, and Rubens’s and Poussin’s: a whole art history in one little pathway.

And then, way beyond the blackened section, in the newly dynamited hollows near where my own stones would have come from, could have been the vein of another fateful lump of lapis. A piece that was ground down and used by the Dutch forger Hans Van Meegeren to make a fake Vermeer. But what Van Meegeren did not know was that a fraud had been committed on a fraudster and his ultramarine had been adulterated with cobalt. He sold the painting to the Nazi commander Hermann Goering for a huge price, pretending it was part of Holland’s heritage, and after the war he was made to stand trial for collaboration. The adulterated ultramarine was both his undoing and his defense—Vermeer could not have used this paint, his lawyer argued, as cobalt had not been invented then. He was sent to prison anyway—but it was a light sentence for forgery, and for the few months until he died he was a national hero for having outwitted the enemy.

When we got back to the village some of the miners were talking excitedly. Abdullah translated. “They are saying that this is an important day at Sar-e-sang,” he said. “No woman has ever been up to the mine before; they say that you are the first.” I wanted to ask some of the men about their lives. “Just low key,” I said to Abdullah. But it turned into the Badakhshan Talk Show: hundreds of men followed us as we wandered around the streets, pulling up chairs for us, listening in fascination. These were all worried men, who missed their families but had to continue here, earning a pittance, because there wasn’t anywhere else to go. I talked to an old snuff salesman. He had six children living on mulberries and grass in the mountains. His entire stock was ten tins of snuff, which he could sell for the equivalent of five pence each. It wasn’t enough for him to buy food, let alone send anything to his family. What had been the happiest time in his life? I wondered. He drew himself up to his full tiny height, playing expertly to the crowd as he told them his story. The audience laughed heartily and looked with interest at me while Abdullah translated. “The happiest time, he says,” said Abdullah, looking doubtful, “was when he was first married. He and his wife were like horses joined together.”

“I broke three awls on your boots,” suddenly squeaked a voice from the darkness of one shop we passed. Abdullah and I peered in to where the voice had seemed to come from—and saw a small man perched on a box with a huge old-fashioned boot in his lap like a character from a Hans Christian Andersen fairy story. The cobbler was forty-nine, but like so many of the men there he looked twenty years older. He had eight children, he told me, and none of them wanted to learn his trade. “They are too arrogant. This is a humble job.” He didn’t earn much, but business was fine. “When men are poor they will get their boots mended. In hard times they can’t afford to buy new ones.” He lived and worked in that one little room, and he had no friends. “Yes, I am happy,” he said when I asked.

From Sar-e-sang the Kokcha river valley runs south for 30 kilometers, and then opens into the fertile valley of Eskazer. It is here—two hours’ bumpy ride away—that injured miners are treated. When we visited the clinic it seemed abandoned, but then a smiling, almost saintly man appeared. Dr. Khalid certifies two or three deaths a year and treats about five injuries a month from the mine. “Sometimes it is dynamite, sometimes they get hit on the head with rocks,” he said. “And sometimes they just fall down the mountain: those paths are steep.” Dr. Khalid sees about fifty cases of chronic bronchitis a month. “They are working without masks,” he said. “Of course their lungs are damaged.”

From Eskazer some of the earliest lapis donkey trains would have turned east to cross the Dorah pass into Pakistan. Those stones would have been carried down the Indus River, and from there would have travelled by dhow to Egypt. Other, later trains would have carried the lapis north and then west for the long trek to Syria and then via Venice onto the palettes of artists. And it was in this second direction that—saying goodbye to the mines and scratching tenderly at our flea-bites—we turned. We were going back the way we had come, but this time in a jeep that worked.

The European art world had effectively said goodbye, or rather “adieu,” to Sar-e-sang in 1828 when a synthetic version of ultramarine was discovered in France. In 1824 the Société d’Encouragement pour l’Industrie Nationale offered 6,000 francs to anyone who could make a daub that even the twenty-five-year-old Michelangelo would have been able to afford—just 300 francs a kilo and less than a tenth of the cost of real ultramarine. Two chemists claimed the prize—Jean Baptiste Guimet of France and Christian Gmelin, from Tübingen University in Germany. They battled over the blues for several years; but Guimet got the cash, and his discovery has been called “French ultramarine” ever since.

Another useful blue pigment had been invented more than a century earlier—by accident and when a paint-maker in Berlin was actually trying to make red. One day in around 1704, Herr Diesbach was settling down to make carmine lake according to a tried and tested recipe—mixing ground-up cochineal, alum and ferrous sulphate, then precipitating it all with an alkali—when he realized he had run out of alkali. He borrowed some from his boss, but did not realize it had been distilled with animal oil. Suddenly, to his amazement, he found blue instead of red in his flask. The clue is in the “animal” element: the mixture had contained blood, which contains iron. Diesbach had unwittingly created iron ferrocyanide, which was dubbed “Prussian blue” and was instantly popular, particularly as a housepaint.

A hundred and forty years later, Prussian blue became the basis of something that changed the face of architecture and design forever: the first ever industrial photocopying process. John Herschel was a chemist and an astrologer, and he was also the first Englishman to take up photography. In 1842 he realized that if he held a pattern drawn on tracing paper over photo-sensitive paper and shone a lamp over both of them, the bits that were not protected by dark lines would change their chemical formula in the light. They would shift subtly from ammonium ferric citrate to ammonium ferrous citrate. If the paper was then dunked in a vat of potassium ferrocyanide, the ferrous bits would turn into Prussian blue, while the ferric ones would stay neutral. The resulting ghostly pattern of white lines on blue paper was called a “blueprint,” and the word’s meaning has shifted subtly to mean any design for the future, whether or not it is in photocopyable form.

Through the nineteenth century Prussian blue became less popular: some artists still liked to mix it with yellow gamboge and use it as green, but most felt it was less brilliant than other blues, and certainly less long lasting. The end of the Prussian blue era is symbolized in a decision by the American crayon company Binney & Smith. In 1958 the company changed the name of its Prussian blue crayola pencil to Midnight Blue. Why? Because teachers were complaining that schoolchildren couldn’t relate to Prussian history.

When I returned to London I went back to the National Gallery. I had my best blue stone in my pocket and, feeling slightly fanciful, I stood in front of
The Entombment
, imagining the grieving mother now clad in best violet-tinged
surpar
robes, painted with the lapis I had brought back for her. A French couple walked over to assess the work. “It’s rather horrible, for a Michelangelo,” the woman commented to her companion, looking at that drab Mary Magdalene and that odd John the Evangelist. They moved on, but silently I had to agree. It was not his best; perhaps he did well to leave it unfinished.