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ContentsJUNE 2016

Contributors

Discussion

Phenomena American Icon: Carleton Watkins

Art: Off the Deep End

Small Talk: Mary Roach

Adaptation: The Neanderthal Diet

Essay: Wild Irish Sage

Fast Forward: Hacking the Amazon

Art of the Impossible Christo’s latest installation, opening this month on a lake in Italy, will make walking on water sublime. BY JEFF MACGREGOR

Ask Smithsonian

A World Without MosquitoesWith the advent of gene-editing technology, scientists now have the ability to eradicate one of humankind’s deadliest foes. But should they? BY JERRY ADLER

Power PlayerRallying crowds in Greenwood, Mis-sissippi, 50 years ago, activist Stokely Carmichael galvanized the civil rights movement with an impassioned call for “black power” BY WIL HAYGOOD

Blood in the Clouds A century ago, the high, rugged peaks of Italy’s Dolomites became a killing ground, the site of some of the worst fighting in World War I—or in any war since BY BRIAN MOCKENHAUPT

Wildlife Warriors In central Africa, a former Israeli commando and his team are deploying battle-tested tactics and the latest technology to stop the runaway slaughter of elephants BY JOSHUA HAMMER

Passage to the GodsThe discovery of a tunnel

beneath a storied pyramid at the ancient Mexican

metropolis of Teotihuacán offers new clues to a lost

civilization BY MATTHEW SHAER

A carved stone jaguar at

Teotihuacán.

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Contributors

Brian Mockenhaupt Despite years of rock-climbing experience, the Army veteran and

Outside contributing editor says the ascents he made in the Dolomites for “Blood in the Clouds” were a technical challenge. “There was a long day when we did 19 pitches, 1,800 feet,” Mockenhaupt recalls. “I’d never done

anything that long.” But the story he was pursuing, about the Italian soldiers who scaled the same peaks to attack the Austrians in World War I, kept things in perspective. “Climbing at night with no safety equipment, and

someone at the top waiting to kill you, it meant the climbing itself was the least dangerous part.”

Stefen ChowWith a background in mountaineering (including a successful ascent of Mount Everest), Chow says the hardest part of photographing high in the Dolomites wasn’t the climbing, but not speaking the language. The Beijing-based photographer’s work frequently appears in the Wall Street Journal and Fortune, and he is working on a long-term project called “The Poverty Line,” about the food choices available to impoverished people around the world.

Amy CrawfordCrawford, who is based in Boston and has been writing for Smithsonian for ten years, frequently covers art for the Phenomena section. “It can be harder to write short than long,” she says concisely, making a point that anyone who has tried to write haiku can appreciate. Her latest piece dives into the work of Heather Perry (“Off the Deep End”), who photographs people underwater while holding her breath. “She said she tends to outlast her subjects.”

Jeff MacGregorThe Smithsonian correspondent has long been fascinated by—obsessed with?—the

monumental artist Christo. Since 1983, MacGregor has been to Christo installations in Florida, California and New York. For his story on Christo’s upcoming work (“Art of

the Impossible”), MacGregor visited the artist’s Manhattan studio and also spent a week with him and his busy team in Italy. MacGregor was so absorbed in the project,

The Floating Piers, that by the time he visited the lake where it will be displayed for two weeks beginning in June, he felt its absence, “as if it was already missing from

the landscape.” The sought-after Christo, he said, “is never not working, but he was incredibly gracious with his time.”

Pete MullerThe Nairobi-based photographer says he tends to focus on “issues of conflict,

masculinity and violence.” He spent weeks on “Wildlife Warriors,” an assignment that he described as uniquely dangerous. “Even if you don’t get into a firefight,” Muller

says, “there are all kinds of things that can make you sick, and you’re very far away. I have never been to places more remote.” His work on this story was supported by

the Magnum Emergency Fund.

Jennie Rothenberg GritzThe new Smithsonian senior editor caught up with the renowned “wild” gardener Mary Reynolds in Ireland. Reynolds, who advocates getting in touch with nature to divine how plants themselves want to grow, urged Rothenberg Gritz to jump into a forest pond with her. (She declined.) Reynolds is unique: “She uses Irish stories about curses and spells to explain why intentions matter in gardening,” says Rothenberg Gritz.

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Wil HaygoodThe author of The Butler (the story that inspired the award-winning movie)

and Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination That Changed America, Haygood is one of the nation’s leading observers of the civil

rights movement. In “Power Player,” he takes a fresh look at a historic moment in the career of the activist Stokely Carmichael. Haygood is currently the Boadway

Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Miami University.

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Inside @NASA’s plans to send humans to Mars with Dava Newman via @SmithsonianMag.

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Discussion

FROM THE EDITORS While the May issue as a whole explored cutting edge technology and research, “Battle for the Soul of Star Trek” took a deep dive into cultural history, marking the 50th anniversary of the TV show’s debut. “Even I didn’t know some of this stuff,” science fiction writer Tom Marcinko tweeted. Highlighting the theme of the three-day Future Is Here festival that the magazine hosted in Washington, D.C., Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner, appeared onstage and lit up social media when he said the technology of “Star Trek” is “not that far-fetched” anymore.

“Trek” Effect “Star Trek” in all of its incarnations has profoundly affected pop culture, science and technology, but there is no one it has affected more than its legion of fans. As one of those fans, I can state with conviction that I wouldn’t be the person I am now, as a writer, as a teacher, as a human being, if “Trek’s” optimistic take on humanity and its direction had not shaped my worldview.

Kristin DilleyFACEBOOK

Up in the AirIt’s exciting to see the future in transportation (“Ready for Takeoff”), where the poten-tial for error is “shifted from the driver to the programmer.” Unfortunately, computers, software and wireless communication are only as reliable as their weakest links. Sig-nificant advances in removing software bugs and becoming impervious to hacking and jamming are needed. The last two decades of “progress” has not slowed the growing risk of their use.

Peter DunhamSYRACUSE, NEW YORK

Drone cars and flying cars will be an improvement over distracted and emotional human drivers. Pure technology, focused solely on the task at hand, will allow humans to harm-lessly perform all the “passenger behaviors” they currently perform behind the wheel.

Terrie CorbettFACEBOOK

Planet Money While we spend an inordinate amount of money on space exploration (“Next Stop Mars”), with minimal benefits for mankind, our oceans and waterways are being destroyed. Let’s funnel these dollars into projects here on Earth.

Joseph LehrhauptVIA EMAIL

Rebel with a CauseThank you for Nathaniel Philbrick’s fine article on Benedict Arnold (“Traitors and Haters”). Obviously there was a lot more involved in his defection than most Americans are aware of. Had it not been for his wife, his name might not be synonymous with traitor.

Gary N. MillerVIA EMAIL

Citizen Welles Any question of Citizen Kane’s authorship (“Sparks Fly Over Tabloid Biz Flick!”) was re-solved with Robert L. Carringer’s 1978 essay in Critical Inquiry, “The Scripts of Citizen Kane.” Carringer studied the collection of script records—“almost a day-to-day record of the history of the scripting”—that was then still intact at RKO. He reviewed all seven drafts and concluded that “the full evidence reveals that Welles’s contribution to the Citizen Kane script was not only substantial but definitive.” For a short time I was Car-ringer’s research assistant and was involved with this project.

George H. ScheetzBATAVIA, ILLINOIS

To Smithsonian MembersSome members have been receiving “renewal notices” sent by independent magazine companies that are not authorized by Smithsonian. Many of the mailed notices list a price higher than you would find on an order card in this issue and are called “Notice of Continuation/New Order.” Such unauthorized solicitations are an industrywide problem that is not isolated to Smithsonian. Any renewal or billing notice you receive directly from Smithsonian about your membership will be mailed from either Washington, D.C. or Tampa, Florida. We do have agreements with a small number of authorized magazine companies to sell subscriptions. If you have any questions or concerns about whether an offer you receive by mail or by phone is legitimate, please do not hesitate to contact us first.

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henomenaA C U R AT E D L O O K AT S C I E N C E , H I STORY A N D C U LT U R E

The beauty of Yosemite, long before Ansel Adams

Love at First SightIn June of 1864, as Sherman’s armies were moving to-ward Atlanta and Grant’s were recovering from a bloody loss at Cold Harbor, President Abraham Lincoln took a break from the grim, all-consuming war to sign a law pro-tecting a slice of land “in the granite peak of the Sierra Ne-vada Mountains.” The act granted the area “known as the Yo-Semite Valley” to the state of California, to “be held for public use, resort, and recreation . . . inalienable for all time.” It was the federal government’s first act to preserve a part of nature for the common good—a precursor of the National Park Service, now enjoying its centennial—and it might not have happened but for an obscure 34-year-old named Carleton Watkins.

Born in a small town in New York, Watkins headed west in 1849 to seek his fortune in California’s gold rush, to no avail. After apprenticing to a pioneer daguerreo-typist named Robert Vance, he made his money shooting mining estates. In the summer of 1861, Watkins set out to photograph Yosemite, carrying a literal ton of equip-ment on mules—tripods, dark tent, lenses and a novel invention for taking sharp photographs of landscapes on glass plates nearly two feet across.

We associate Yosemite with the photographs of Ansel Adams, who acknowledged Watkins as one of “the great Western photographers,” but it was Watkins who first turned Half Dome, Cathedral Rocks and El Capitan into unforgettable sights. Weston Naef, a photography cura-tor and co-author of a book about Watkins, described him as “probably the greatest American artist of his era, and hardly anyone has heard of him.”

Sketches and awed descriptions of Yosemite’s grand views had reached the East in the mid-1800s, but noth-ing provoked public reaction like Watkins’ photos, which were exhibited at a gallery in New York in 1862. “The views of lofty mountains, of gigantic trees, of falls of wa-ter. . . are indescribably unique and beautiful,” the Times reported. The great landscape painter Albert Bierstadt promptly headed to Yosemite. Ralph Waldo Emerson said Watkins’ images of sequoias “are proud curiosities here to all eyes.”

Watkins’ works coincided with a move by California boosters to promote the state by setting aside lands in Yosemite, home to “perhaps some of the greatest won-ders of the world,” Senator John Conness bragged to Congress in 1864. Historians believe that Conness, who owned a collection of Watkins photographs and was a friend of Lincoln’s, showed the images to the president the year before he signed the bill protecting Yosemite.

Watkins’ fame as a photographer rose, and he journeyed throughout the West: Columbia Gorge, the Farallones, Yellowstone. But he kept returning to Yosemite. Today, it can be hard for us postmodernists, who are more used to images of wilderness than the thing itself, and who tend to associate photographs of Yosemite with clothing ads, to imagine the impact of those first vivid pictures. Yet somehow they retain their power—make us “look anew at nature itself, shining with a clarity that is at once ordi-nary and yet very magical,” says Christine Hult-Lewis, a Watkins expert.

In his later years, Watkins lost his eyesight, and then his livelihood. The 1906 earthquake destroyed his studio and many of his negatives (and threw 4-year-old Ansel Adams against a wall, giving him a crooked nose). For a time Watkins lived with his wife and children in a boxcar. He died 100 years ago this month, 86 years old, broke and blind, at Napa State Hospital, an asylum. Two months later, President Woodrow Wilson established the Na-tional Park Service, a steward for the sublime place Wat-kins had shown to a war-weary nation. -BY BROOKE JARVIS

SMITHSONIAN.COM

Watkins photographed

vistas like the valley’s

Half Dome.

The Domes.

http://www.samuelhubbard.com

Sharing a pool with the Bowdoin College swim team was like “being in the water with sea otters,” says Heather Perry, who captured this playful moment while holding her breath at the bottom of the pool. Many aquatic photographers use scuba gear, but Perry prefers freediving (she feels that a breathing apparatus would just get in her way). The Maine native, who began her career as a marine biologist, has returned to the water again and again in her two decades behind the camera, using the medium to explore the question of our place in the natural world. Certainly the most buoyant answer can be found in her portraits of swimmers, bubbly images revealing the freedom and joy that people of all ages and shapes find in the water. “It’s the only place on earth you can feel truly weightless,” she says. “We’re made of water, we come from water, and I think it’s the place the human body is most at home.” –AMY CRAWFORD

ART

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Off the Deep EndIs it crazy to think that people are at their most natural in the water?

“A lot of freediving is psychological,” says Perry, who finds the experience meditative.

http://www.undiscoveredflorida.com

Extreme Paleo

Humans tend to dismiss Neanderthals as dimwits, yet the brains of our doomed cousins were actually larger than our own. “If you go to a site from 150,000 years ago,” says Miki Ben-Dor, a Tel Aviv University ar-chaeologist, “you won’t be able to tell whether Neanderthals or Homo sapiens lived there, because they had all the same tools.” Which helps explain why, to fathom how our fates diverged, he recently scrutinized Neanderthals’ bodies instead of their skulls.

While humans have barrel-shaped chests and narrow pelvises, Ne-anderthals had bell-shaped torsos with wide pelvises. The prevailing explanation has been that Neanderthals, often living in colder and drier environments than their human contemporaries, needed more energy and therefore more oxygen, so their torsos swelled to hold a bigger re-spiratory system.

But Ben-Dor had a gut feeling this was wrong. What if the difference was what they ate? Living in Eurasia 300,000 to 30,000 years ago, Ne-anderthals settled in places like the Polar Urals and southern Siberia—not bountiful in the best of times, and certainly not during ice ages. In the heart of a tundra winter, with no fruits and veggies to be found, ani-mal meat—made of fat and protein—was likely the only energy source.

Alas, though fat is easier to digest, it’s scarce in cold conditions, as prey animals themselves burn up their fat stores and grow lean. So Neanderthals must have eaten a great deal of protein, which is tough to metabolize and puts heavy demands on the liver and kidneys to re-move toxic byproducts. In fact, we humans have a “protein ceiling” of between 35 and 50 percent of our diet; eating too much more can be dangerous. Ben-Dor thinks that Neanderthals’ bodies found a way to utilize more protein, developing enlarged livers and kidneys, and chests and pelvises that widened over the millennia to accommodate these beefed-up organs.

For confirmation of his theory, Ben-Dor looks to today’s Inuit peoples, who live in northern climes, subsist at times on an all-meat diet and have larger livers and kidneys and longer ribs than average Europeans.

To cope with the fat famine, Neanderthals probably also specialized in hunting gigantic animals like mammoths, which retain fat longer in poor conditions, and require greater strength but less energy and speed to kill. (Mammoths don’t run away, and you only have to kill one to feast for months.)

But as these mega-beasts vanished, the burly Neanderthals likely struggled to chase down smaller, swifter prey. Meanwhile, humans, with our narrow pelvises and agile forms, scampered into the future. -ABIGAIL TUCKER

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A new theory links the Neanderthals’ fate to their meat-heavy diet

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Best-selling author of Stiff and Gulp. Her latest book is Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, out this month.

Mary RoachYou have a knack for finding strange lines of work. What’s the oddest you’ve uncovered?

Running the insect kitchen in the entomology branch at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. When I visited, the chef was making meals for sand fly larvae. (Sand flies present a threat to troops in the form of leishmaniasis.) It’s rare to find a recipe that begins, “Mix rabbit feces, alfalfa and water . . . ” Corpses play a big role in this book. What about this second life of bodies is so interesting?

That it’s possible to make a more profound contribution to society after you’re dead than before. The ability to feel no pain is a kind of superpower that corpses, in the hands of sci-ence, can use to help make the world better. Also interesting, especially in military science, is the discomfort around their use in research. Even though they’re dead—are bone and tissue and skin now—they still look like people. And we have a natural, if irrational, reluctance to “harm” them.

What breakthrough in military science is unfairly overlooked?

Lower-tech stuff falls through the cracks. A simple V-shaped chassis for personnel carriers that deflects the energy from an IED. Or an improved tourniquet that fits in a pocket and you can install on your own limb to stop a life-threatening bleed.

SMALL TALK

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On a recent spring evening, the landscape designer Mary Reynolds greeted admirers in West Cork, Ireland, looking like one of the nature spirits that inspire her work. She wore a flower-covered green dress, her auburn hair still damp and tousled from a dip in a forest pool. “I needed to immerse myself, to feel all those watery plants under my feet,” she confided. Then she turned to chat with an elderly man in Gaelic.

Throughout Europe, the ebullient Reynolds is famous for upending the gardening establishment with her subversive designs. A biopic based on her life, Dare to Be Wild, won an audience prize at the Dublin International Film Festival last year. Her new book, The Garden Awakening, sold out on Amazon UK the day of its release. “She’s really onto something,” says the Irish rock star Glen Hansard (best known for the movie Once). “We must nurture the wildness within us and see the beauty in the wildness without.”

Reynolds wasn’t always so wild. When she began designing gardens two decades ago, she was willing to create nearly anything a client wanted. “It could’ve been Japanese or Italian,” she says. “It could’ve been a Versailles garden in a 20-square-meter space.” Then one night in 2001, she dreamed she was a crow flying over an ancient forest. When she woke up, the mes-sage seemed clear: “I shouldn’t be making any more pretty gardens.”

After that, Reynolds focused on evoking mystical Irish landscapes. In 2002, at the age of just 28, she won a gold medal at the prestigious Chelsea Flower Show. Improbably, she beat Prince Charles and other luminar-ies with an entry that included weeds, rabbit droppings and giant stone thrones. The BBC and RTÉ invited her to film garden makeovers, and the British government commissioned a garden at Royal Kew. She drew in-spiration for that work from the W.B. Yeats poem “The Stolen Child”: A path led visitors onto a moss-covered island shaped like a sleeping fairy woman. “Fairies, to me, embody the spirit of the land,” she says. “I wanted to lead people back to that place.”

Not everyone responded enthusiastically. “Some people at Chelsea said, ‘God, this is like a Celtic Disneyland,’ ” Reynolds recalls. A Dublin newspaper derided her for “Paddywhackery”—suggesting she’d created the garden equivalent of Lucky Charms.

But her work has profound meaning in a country where the Penal Laws long forbade Catholics from owning land. Ireland’s most celebrated gar-dens were English-designed, with sweeping lawns, manicured hedges and meticulous knots of roses. Reynolds invented a new, defiantly Irish aesthetic. For Chelsea, she enlisted the help of traditional stonemasons and plant experts. “We were quite a raggedy crew and a source of amuse-ment to the other entrants,” recalls Christy Collard, a builder from the Future Forests Garden Centre in West Cork, who supervised the project. (He also became romantically involved with Reynolds, a major plot point in the film.)

It’s Reynolds’ approach to planting that truly sets her apart. She chooses varieties that naturally grow together and doesn’t believe in weeding or breaking up the soil. More esoterically, she asks the land what it wants to become. “The gardens we have now are controlled, manipulated spaces,” she told the crowd at her book launch in West Cork. “It’s like forcing a child to wear a pink tutu.”

What land really wants, says Reynolds, is to evolve into a forest. Her book (the U.S. edition comes out in September) lays out a ten-year plan that incorporates trees, root vegetables, creeping vines and optional chickens. After reading it, the British environmentalist Jane Goodall sent Reynolds a video message, gushing, “I love the way you bring in the spirituality of the land.”

At times, the book reads almost like an anti-gardening manifesto. But Reynolds doesn’t believe in letting the land revert to wilderness. “The soil would heal itself,” she says. “All the little creatures would come back. But something important would be missing: We wouldn’t be part of that process.” -JENNIE ROTHENBERG GRITZ

ESSAY

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Wild Irish Sage

With weeds, critters and Celtic symbols, Mary Reynolds is trying to change what it means to garden

“The land connects with us in ways we don’t always understand,” says Reynolds.

teach me toHAVE A BIG PROBLEM.I want to learn how to think, not what

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Teach me to think outside the box so

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Join the conversation at XQsuperschools.org.

Hacking the Amazon

Of all the ways that the industrialized world has encroached on the indigenous people of the Amazon, you might not think that the most disastrous intervention is also the simplest: free food.

But that’s one takeaway from new research led by the Stanford ecolo-gist José Fragoso. The study, the largest of its kind, drew on interviews with some 9,600 indigenous people in southern Guyana and surveys of wildlife populations over 46,000 square kilometers—an area almost the size of Costa Rica. Researchers tallied village populations and used satellite images to gauge forest cover. Then they plugged that unprec-edented data into a supercomputer, ran elaborate programs to predict the impacts of multiple interventions on multiple outcomes, and pro-jected those findings far into the future.

What they found is that ecosystems can survive, though in di-minished form, if mod-est amounts of forest are converted to farm-land. But bringing in outside consumables can push local ecosys-tems past the breaking

point. For instance, while a village might grow by 40 percent in the 100 years after health workers introduce commercial medications—a sustainable increase—that village could double in size over roughly the same period if it began relying on outside food, the research shows. And that larger population would lead to the collapse of the surrounding ecosystem, because villagers would have to kill more wildlife and clear more farmland to survive.

The research suggests how to better protect the world’s remaining wild places and the people living in them. Fragoso is working with govern-ments and others to help Amazon villages maintain self-sufficiency. In-stead of trucking in crates of food, he says, create jobs to preserve local languages. He isn’t against helping people in need: “It’s a question of how do we do this better, rather than don’t do it at all.” -THOMAS STACKPOLE

FAST FORWARD

SMITHSONIAN.COM

Paradoxically, food aid can cause game like the black curassow to be overhunted.

OF THE BRAZILIAN AMAZON IS SET ASIDE FOR INDIGENOUS PEOPLE

Can a pioneering computer model save indigenous people from our best intentions?

ARTCHRISTO

The renowned Christo dazzles the world again, this time using a lake in northern Italy as his canvas

Art of the Impossible

by Jeff MacGregor

For Christo, working in his SoHo studio, art is a “scream of freedom.”

hristo Invites Public to Walk on Water

—headline, The Art Newspa-per, April 2015

“I thought, ‘I’m going to be 80 years old. I’d like to do something very hard.’ ”

—Christo

The lake is impossible. The lake is a painting of a lake; the water a painting of water. Like floating

on a second sky. Too blue. Too cool. Too deep. Impossible. The mountains, too. Too steep, too green with trees, too white with snow. Villages pour down the hills and run russet and ocher and brown to the water’s edge. Red tile rooftops necklace the shore. Flat calm, and at midday the quiet carries from one end of Lago d’Iseo to the other, from the vineyards to the mines to the small hotels. The stillness here has weight. He raises his voice.

“Floating Piers will be three kilome-ters long. And will use 220,000 poly-ethylene cubes. Fifty centimeters by 50 centimeters. Two hundred twenty thousand screws. Interlocking.”

KiloMAYters. CentiMAYters. His English is good, but the Bulgarian ac-cent is thick. Even now, so many years later. He tilts his chin up to be heard.

“Ninety thousand square meters of fabric.”

MAYters.“Not just on the Piers, but in the streets also.”The hair is a white halo beneath a red hard hat and above the red anorak.

Dress shirt and jeans. Oversized brown boots. He is slender, big-eared and fine-boned, with long, expressive hands. Not tall but straight, unbent even at 80. He radiates energy and purpose.

“From Sulzano to Monte Isola and out to Isola di San Paolo,” he says, pointing. “Each pier built in sections 100 meters long. Then joined.” Behind the glasses the eyes are dark, lively, tired. He smiles. This, the talking, is part of the art, too. “Sixteen meters wide, and slope into the water along the sides,” he gestures a shallow angle with his right hand, “like a beach.” Two dozen members of the Italian press and two dozen local politicians nod and stand and whisper.

“One hundred sixty anchors. Each anchor weighs five tons,” Christo says.He’s standing just aft of the deckhouse on the boat the divers use to sink

those anchors. The boat is a long platform on long hulls. Like him, the boat and the divers are from Bulgaria. The divers have been out here most of the winter, working in the dark and the cold and the unimaginable silence of the

Christo’s works “cross boundaries in our imagination about what’s possible. People like the sense of joyousness they celebrate, the joy in the work. The openness and exuberant colors.”

deep lake. “One hundred meters depth,” says Christo. The boat is a few hun-dred yards offshore, near the floating corral where finished sections of pier are tied up. Waiting.

He moves from group to group —everyone gets a comment, everyone gets a quote, a photo—surrounded by reporters and local mayors.

“Thirty-five boats. Thirty Zodiacs. Thirty brand-new motors.”Cameras. Microphones. Notebooks.“Sixteen days. Hundreds of workers.”The smile widens.“This art is why I don’t take commissions. It is absolutely irrational.”In the construction shed onshore, still more Bulgarians are back from lunch.

Two teams screw together the Floating Piers block by block by block, eight hours a day, seven days a week. It will take months. You can hear the sound of the big impact wrench for miles in the quiet.

Two weeks at a time, he is the most famous artist on earth. Christo. Last name Javacheff. Born June 13, 1935, in Bulgaria. Studies art.

Flees the Soviet advance across the Eastern bloc at 21, arrives in Paris spring, 1958. Meets his future wife and collaborator that year while painting her mother’s portrait. The first wave of fame comes when they block the rue Vis-conti in Paris with stacked oil drums. A sculptural commentary on the Berlin Wall and oil and Algeria and culture and politics. That was 1962.

“At a very early moment in postwar art, they expanded our understanding of what art could be,” says art historian Molly Donovan, an associate curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. “Crossing the boundary out of the gallery and the museum—by putting works in the public sphere, in the built environment—that was really groundbreaking in the early ’60s.”

Then small wraps and faux storefronts and draped fabrics and wrapped foun-tains and towers and galleries. Then 10,000 square feet of fabric wrapping the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Then in 1969 a million square feet of fabric draped and tied over the rocks outside Sydney and they are suddenly/not suddenly world famous. “The concept of art was so narrow at the time,” recalled Australian artist Imants Tillers, “that Wrapped Coast appeared to be the work of a madman.” Filmmakers start following them. Journalists. Critics. Fans. Detrac-tors. Then the debate over what it is. Conceptual art? Land art? Performance art? Environmental art? Modernist? Post-Minimalist?

As critic Paul Goldberger has said, it is “at once a work of art, a cultural event, a political happening and an ambitious piece of business.”

Valley Curtain, Colorado, 1972. Two hundred thousand, two hundred square

feet of fabric drawn across the canyon at Rifle Gap. Running Fence, California, 1976. A wall of fabric 18 feet high running 24.5 miles through the hills north of San Francisco into the sea; now in the collections of the Smithsonian In-stitution. Surrounded Islands, Miami, 1983. Eleven islands in Biscayne Bay surrounded by 6.5 million square feet of bright pink fabric. The Pont Neuf Wrapped, Paris, 1985. The oldest bridge in the city wrapped in 450,000 square feet of fabric, tied with eight miles of rope. The Umbrellas, Japan and Califor-nia, 1991. Three thousand one hundred umbrellas, 20 feet high, 28 feet wide; blue in Ibaraki Prefecture, yellow along the I-5 north of Los Angeles. Cost? $26 million. Two accidental deaths. Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1995. One million square feet of silver fabric; nearly ten miles of blue rope; five million visitors in two weeks. The Gates, New York City, 2005.

“They cross boundaries in our imagination about what’s possible,” Don-ovan says. “People like the sense of joyousness that they celebrate, the joy in the work. The work isn’t whimsical, necessarily. They’re serious works. The openness and exuberant colors—people respond to that.”

“Their projects continue to work on your mind,” she says. “Why do they feel so powerful or meaningful? On the global scale, they’ve elicited a lot of thought about what art can be, where it can be, what it can look like. They’ve re-ally broadened the locations for where art can happen.”

So in 2005 when 7,503 gates open along 23 miles of paths in Central Park, attracting more than four million vis-itors, columnist Robert Fulford wrote in Canada’s National Post, “The Gates came and went quickly, like an eclipse of the sun. In their evanescence they recalled the Japanese cult of the cherry blossom, which blooms briefly each spring and in Japanese poetry symbolizes the brevity of life.”

“I think the really amazing thing about Christo, the reason why he has found the sweet spot between the art world and the world at large—and is such a popular public figure,” Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times says, “is because he realized that if he took art, if he used the political process and public space as the place in which to make art, and to bring the public into the process itself, that he would redefine both the audience for this art and also redefine what had been called public art before.”

“Our work is only for joy and beauty,” Jeanne-Claude would say, or “It is not a matter of patience, it is a matter of passion.” This is his first major project without her.

Halfway between Bergamo and Brescia; halfway from Milan to Verona on the road to Venice—Lago d’Iseo is the fourth-largest lake in Lombardy. It is a low-key summer resort with a history going back to antiquity. The mountains are veined with marble and iron and have been quarried and mined for more than 1,000 years. Franciacorta, Italy’s answer to Champagne, is made from the grapes grown on the lake’s southern shore. In the 1920s there was a famous seaplane factory near the little town of Pilzone. But the lake has never had the allure or the matinee idol star power of its more famous neighbor, Lake Como. Until now.

From June 18 to July 3, 2016, Christo will reimagine Italy’s Lake Iseo. The Floating Piers will consist of 70,000 square meters of shimmering yellow fabric, carried by a modular dock system of 220,000 high-density polyethylene cubes floating on the surface of the water.

—christojeanneclaude.net

It isn’t really yellow. Is it? More like saffron. Like The Gates in Central Park. Like Valley Curtain. That signature color of theirs. Orange, but not orange. Orange brightened by something like gold; tempered by something like red. Maybe. And it’ll be different at the edges where it’s wet. Darker. Like Jeanne-Claude’s hair.

Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon. The general’s daughter. Organized. Tough. Funny. Argumentative. Charming. Beautiful. Christo Javacheff ’s lover and wife and partner in art for more than 50 years. Famously born on the same day. Famously inseparable. She was the one out front, the one offering quotes.

“Our work is only for joy and beauty,” Jeanne-Claude would say, or “It is not a matter of patience, it is a matter of passion.”

She died in 2009. The name Christo belongs to them both. This is his first major project without her.

Maybe the best way to understand her, to understand them, is to go online and watch the film from her memorial at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

When she says “Artists do not retire. They die,” it knocks you back.

Christo is sitting in the café of a lakefront hotel being interviewed by a writer from Elle magazine. He explains how the Floating Piers will connect the main-land to the island of Monte Isola for the first time ever. He talks about the beauty of the medieval tower on the island, the Martinengo, and the abbey at the summit, and he talks about tiny Isola di San Paolo, a Beretta family vaca-tion home, and he tells her about the complex engineering and the ridiculous

expense and what a bright, brief complication it will all be. “Sixteen days, hundreds of workers, $15 million.” He explains the financing—he pays for every project by selling his art, no

donations, no sponsorships—and suggests she read the 2006 Harvard Busi-ness School case study to learn the details of how they do it.

In the months and years leading up to every installation, he produces hun-dreds of smaller pieces of art: preparatory sketches, studies, models, paintings, collages. This he does alone. Today the New York studio is filled with scores of canvases in every size and shade of blue; lakes and piers in every medium from pen to pencil to pastel, crayon to paint to charcoal; islands and towers and ab-beys mapped as if by satellite, or sketched in a few quick strokes; simple as a color block, or complex and precise as an architectural elevation. Some of the multipanel pieces are several meters wide by a meter or more high and sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars to a loyal circle of collectors.

No more will be produced once The Floating Piers has come and gone.

At the shed a few hundred meters up the shore, The Floating Piers team works out of a converted shipping container. The little room is immaculate. Lined with tables and shelves and lockers and computers, stacked with equip-ment and documents, buzzing with purpose. Three people on three phones having three conversations in three languages. The espresso machine hisses and pops.

There’s Wolfgang Volz, project manager. He’s the smart, charming, compact German who’s worked on every Christo and Jeanne-Claude project since 1971. Vladimir Yavachev, operations manager, Christo’s nephew—tall, dark, funny. Diver and cinematographer, he started his career with Xto and JC more than 20 years ago—by carrying Wolfgang’s camera bag. His wife and daughter, Izabella and Mina, are here as well. Working. Frank Seltenheim, assembly manager—who got his start as one of the climbers draping fabric over the Reichstag. Anto-nio Ferrera, documentarian, who records every waking moment of every proj-ect. Marcella Maria Ferrari, “Marci,” new chief administrator. “She’s already one of us,” says Wolfgang, who is also simultaneously on the phone with New York. New York in this case being Jonathan Henery, Jeanne-Claude’s nephew and the vice president for all the projects. Slim, mid-40s, he worked shoulder to shoulder with her for 20 years and does now what she did. Organize. Catalog. Energize. Mediate.

The office in New York is an old cast-iron building in SoHo. Christo and Jeanne-Claude moved there from Paris in 1964, bought the building from

their landlord in the early 1970s and never left. The reception room smells of flowers and honey and patchouli, and there’s always music playing low some-where. And if you go to visit Christo, he’ll come down from the studio to greet you, his French cuffs tied with string and covered in charcoal dust, and talk to you about anything. About the old days downtown with Warhol and Jasper and the guys.

“Oh sure,” he says, “yes, Andy and Rauschenberg, Johns, in that time, we were all trying to make our work visible.”

About what’s next.“We’re waiting now for the federal appeals to tell us about Over the River [a

long-planned fabric installation on the Arkansas River in Colorado]. It could happen any moment.”

About Jeanne-Claude.“I miss most the arguments about the work.”And he is not only polite, he is warm and affectionate and engaged, and he

never says it, he’s too well-mannered, but he wants to get back to work. As soon as you go, as soon as you shake hands and head for the door, he’s on his way back upstairs to the studio.

Catastrophe.In front of all those reporters, Christo said the ropes for the project come from

the USA.“They come from Cavalieri Corderia,” Vlad says. “Up the road in Sale Mara-

sino! Five kilometers from here! Where you’re speaking tonight!”“Oyoyoy,” says Christo, his comic incantation of surprise or confusion or

self-mockery.“You have to say first thing that the ropes for Floating Piers come from Cava-

lieri Corderia of Sale Marasino.” Vladimir is emphatic.This is important. Every project uses as many local vendors and fabricators

as possible. Nearly a quarter of a million floating cubes are being blow-molded around the clock in four factories in northern Italy, for example. Goodwill and good business.

“Oyoyoy. Cavalieri Corderia of Sale Marasino.”You’ll hear him whispering it the rest of the day.The presentation at the community center in Sale Marasino is the same one

he gave two weeks ago at a high school in New York City, but the simultane-ous translation slows it down a little. Wrapped Coast. Valley Curtain. Running Fence. Surrounded Islands. Pont Neuf. Reichstag. The Gates.

That Christo speaks in run-on sentences powered by his enthusiasm makes a translator’s job harder; she delivers the Italian version prestissimo—but can never quite catch up.

First thing he says: “I want to thank the ropemakers of Cavalieri Corderia for all the rope we’re using. Excellent.” The room erupts in a round of applause.

The small theater is full, maybe 300 people. This is one of the last stops on the charm campaign. They’ve done this show in almost every village around the lake. The audience sees all the projects PowerPointed—from Wrapped Coast to The Gates in a series of photos, a greatest hits flyover, then a few sketches of The Floating Piers’ 220,000 cubes. 70,000 square meters of fabric. 160 anchors. Five tons, etc. And so forth.

He’s out front now, where she used to be. “The art is not just the pier or the color or the fabric, but is the lake and the

mountains. The whole landscape is the work of art. It’s all about you having a personal relationship with it. You in it, experiencing it. Feeling it. I want you to walk across it barefoot. Very sexy.”

Translation. Applause. Then the audience Q and A.“How much will it cost?” is almost always the first question. “Nothing. It is free. We pay for everything.”

Christo finances his installations by selling artwork: A collage like the one above commands a quarter-million dollars.

“How do we get tickets?”“You don’t need tickets.”“What time does it close?“It will be open around-the-clock. Weather permitting.”“What happens when it’s over?”“We recycle everything.”“How do you stay so energetic?”“I eat for breakfast every day a whole head of garlic, and yogurt.” And Christo always answers two last questions, even when no one asks them.What is it for? What does it do?“It does nothing. It is useless.”And he beams.

Now photographs and autographs with anyone who wants one. Then the mayor takes him up the hill to dinner.

A lovely rustic inn high among the trees. Orazio. In the main dining room, in honor of Christo, an arrangement of every local dish and delicacy. Table after table of antipasti and meat and fish and bread and wine and vinegar from the fields and farms and streams around the lake. A nervous young man rises and makes an earnest speech about the unparalleled quality of the organic local olive oil. When he finishes, two cooks carry in a whole roast suckling pig.

At a table in back Christo picks at a small plate of pickled vegetables and roast pork and bread and olive oil while encouraging everyone else to eat up. “Sometimes we have to remind him to eat at all,” says Vladimir. Wolfgang is on and off the phone about the upcoming meeting in Brescia with the prefetto, the prefect, a kind of regional governor. Very powerful.

After dinner, two things. First, someone presents him with a “wrapped” bicycle. It is oddly reminiscent of his earliest work; that is, there’s a wrapped motorcycle of his from the early 1960s in a collection somewhere worth mil-lions. He’s very gracious about the bike.

Then local author Sandro Albini takes Christo’s elbow and spends several minutes explaining his theory that the background of the painting La Gio-conda (the Mona Lisa) is actually Lago d’Iseo. He makes a convincing case. Leonardo visited here. The timing works. Mr. Albini is a quiet sort, but deter-mined, and the talk goes on awhile.

Giving you the chance to think of Leonardo and art and Christo and how artists work into late life and what that might mean. Some artists simplify as they grow old, the line becoming gestural, the brush stroke schematic; some complicate, and the work becomes baroque, rococo, finding or hiding some-

thing in a series of elaborations. Some plagiarize themselves. Some give up.Matisse, Picasso, Monet, Garcia-Márquez, Bellow, Casals. There’s no one

way to do it. Maybe it’s the desire for a perfection of simplicity. “The two urges, for simplicity and experiment, can pull you in opposite directions,” says Simon Schama, the art historian. He situates Christo and his projects in a long tradition, a continuum extending from Titian to Rembrandt to Miró to de Kooning. “The essence of it is simple, but the process by which it is estab-lished is a great complication.” That’s the tension of late life essentialism. The elemental language of Hemingway in The Old Man and the Sea. Late Mozart, the Requiem. Beethoven, the chilling clarity of the late String Quartets. (So modern they could have been written last week.) Think of Shakespeare, the late plays. The Tempest. Or the Donald Justice poem, “Last Days of Prospero,” part of which reads:

(What tempests he had caused, what lightningsLoosed in the rigging of the world!)If now it was all to do again,Nothing was lacking to his purpose. The idea for the piers is more than 40 years old. Christo and Jeanne-Claude

got the notion from a friend in Argentina who suggested they make an envi-ronmental piece for the River Plate. Couldn’t be done. Then they tried Tokyo Bay, but the bureaucracy was impossible and the technology wasn’t there.

Construction on Lago d’Iseo, Christo says, was as challenging as “building a highway.”

Hence the thought:“I’m going to be 80 years old. I’d like to do something very hard.”The old man is heir to the young man’s dream. The old man honors a prom-

ise. Artists do not retire.Christo thanks Mr. Albini and heads for the car. Now back to the shed. Now to work. Then to sleep.

Now a field trip. To the top of the hill behind the factory. The owners know someone who knows someone who owns an estate on the ridgeline a thousand feet up from the shed. Nine people in a Land Rover Defender on a road like a goat trail drive to the top of the mountain.

It’s a stately old place gated and terraced with low walls and gardens and olive trees. The view from every corner is the whole dome of heaven, a world of Alps and lake and sky.

Christo stands alone at the edge of the garden for a long time. Looks down to the water. Looks down to the sheds. Picturing in the world what he’s already made in his mind. From here he can see it complete.

“Beautiful,” he says to no one in particular. Vlad, less moved in the moment by beauty than by opportunity, points at a

high peak a few kilometers east and says, “We can put the repeater over there.” They’ll have their own radio communications network for The Floating Piers. Operations, security, personnel, logistics.

Then Vlad and Wolfi and Antonio are arranging a portrait-sitting for Marci on one of those low walls, using a smartphone to see if the background matches that of the Mona Lisa—as was explained to them all at such great length. Mar-ci’s smile is indeed enigmatic, but the results are inconclusive.

So. La Gioconda. Think of how it makes you feel. Think of The Gates. Run-ning Fence. The Umbrellas. Wrapped Reichstag. Surrounded Islands. Think of the power of art. The Gates didn’t change Central Park. The Gates didn’t change Manhattan. The Gates changed you. Years later you still think of them.

We reserve for art the same power we grant religion. To transform. Tran-scend. To comfort. Uplift. Inspire. To create in ourselves a state like grace.

Now Brescia, and the prefect.Same presentation, but in a high marble hall to a modest audience of local

swells. The prefetto, square-jawed, handsome, humorless in a perfectly tai-lored blue suit, leads off. Then Christo.

“What I make is useless. Absurd,” and so forth, through the years and the projects. He spends a few minutes on two future possibilities. Over the River, and The Mastaba, a massive architectural undertaking, permanent this time, an Old Kingdom tomb hundreds of feet high built of oil drums in the deserts of Abu Dhabi.

When Christo speaks at these things, you get the sense—infrequently but powerfully—that he’s waiting for Jeanne-Claude to finish his sentence.

After the PowerPoint the power, and a party for the local gentry in the prefetto’s official suite of rooms.

Fancy appetizers, tiny and ambitious, to be eaten standing. Franciacorta in flutes. An entire tabletop of fresh panettone.

For the next hour Christo stands in place as a stream of local dignitaries present themselves. He shakes hands and leans in to listen to each of them. Antonio floats by with his camera. They’ll ask all the same questions. When? How much? What next?

There’s always a little space in the circle for her. If you watch him closely enough you can see it. Or maybe you just think you

see it. Want to see it. There’s a space to his left. And that thing he does with his left hand when he’s talking to the politicians and the bureaucrats. How the fin-gers flex and the thumb brushes the fingertips, like he’s reaching for her hand.

Now west out of Brescia on the autostrada. Christo, Wolfgang, Antonio. Fast. 140, 150, 160 kilometers per hour—the big Mercedes a locomotive in the dark.

Wolfgang driving. Christo deep in the back seat behind him. Antonio up front riding shotgun with the camera in his lap. “I thought that went well,” he says. “They were very nice. They really rolled out the red carpet for us.”

“They did,” says Wolfgang.Christo is quiet for the first time since morning, looking out the window

into Hour 15 of a 20-hour day. Italy is a blur. “Still . . . ”“I think they really like us . . . really like the project.”“Still,” Wolfgang says, “I’d wish for a little less red carpet and a little more

action.”Absently, looking out his window, Christo nods.“You saw that conference room,” Wolfgang says to Antonio. “We’ve spent a

lot of time in that conference room. Hours. Hours and hours.” “On the permissions?”“Yes. We have all the permits and all the permissions. Now. But it took a

lot of meetings around that table. Month after month. Me and Vlad back and

forth. Christo. Back and forth. They are very, um, deliberate.”

And this is part of the art, too, the private meetings and the public hearings and the proposals and counter proposals and the local politicians nodding and smiling. The photo-ops.

“What about the traffic plan?” Christo asks. “Could you tell did he read the traffic plan?”

“I don’t know,” Wolfgang says. “I don’t think so.”“Oyoyoy,” Christo says low from the far corner of the car. The traffic plan for The Floating Piers is 175 pages long. It took a year to

prepare. It cost €100,000. “Maybe he’s read it,” Wolfgang says, his hands motionless on the wheel.

“Maybe he hasn’t. He’s inscrutable.” Floating Piers will draw perhaps 500,000 visitors in 16 days to a town with

one main road.“Oyoyoy.” “Yes. Indeed. Oyoyoy.” “When will they read it?”“Who knows? They are in no hurry.”“We are,” says Christo.“Always,” says Wolfgang.“It would be better to start sooner.”“Undoubtedly.”“And not leave this for the last minute. The buses. The police. The roads.

The people. Oyoyoy. How could they not read it yet?”“Maybe he read it. Maybe they all read it.” “Why do they wait? What do they have to do? Nothing. Nothing. They just

have to agree to it. Just have to say yes. They don’t even have to pay for any-thing. We pay for everything.”

Then everyone is quiet. Italy rushes past. The instrument panel glows.“Still,” Antonio says, “they were very nice.”

Maybe this is the life you’d choose for yourself if you could. Nights all over the world in strange, wonderful places. You and your family. Loved by every-one.

Now a restaurant in Palazzolo sull’Oglio, a small town a half-hour south of the lake.

“Bellissimo grande!” calls a woman on her way out the door as she sees Christo walking past her. Big beautiful.

Vlad found this place. A fourth-generation family cucina run by Maurizio and Grazia Rossi. Modest. Close to the train station. Dark wood. Frosted glass doors. A workingman’s place. On the bar is a Faema E 61 espresso machine as big and bright as the bumper of an antique Cadillac. The dining room in back is hung every which way with the work of local painters. It’s the kind of restaurant you’re nostalgic for even as you’re sitting in it.

“Relax,” Christo says. “Sit down. Eat.”And they do. Frank the climber is

here, and Izabella and Mina, and An-tonio and Wolfi and Vlad, Marci and Christo, and the sweet, long-faced pres-ident of the lake association, Giuseppe Faccanoni. All at the big table up front. Simple menu. Large portions. Tripe soup. Passata di fagioli. White lasa-gna. Local fish. Local meat. Local wine. The owner’s uncle makes the cheese. Franciacorta from the slopes of Lago d’Iseo. “Salute!”

Conversations and sentence fragments around the table, overlapping dia-logue like something out of Preston Sturges. For example, they moved out of a lakeside hotel into a chateau up in the hills.

“We’re saving €30,000 a month,” says Vladimir. “Mina, honey, what do you want?”

“There’s a billiard room,” Christo says.“I don’t want the meatballs,” says Mina. “But no one has used it yet,” says Wolfgang. “I’ll have the tripe. We’re all

working seven days a week.”“Grazie,” says Maurizio. “Maybe the meatballs,” says Izabella.Plates come and go, meatballs are eaten, wine poured. Eventually, briefly,

the traffic plan comes around again. “Oyoyoy.”

Mina is asleep on Izabella’s lap. It’s late. Wolfi and Marci are going back and forth on their phones with the carabinieri. An alarm went off at the shed, but no one knows why. Wolfgang thinks the night watchman tripped it himself.

Dessert now, and Maurizio wants Christo to try the homemade halvah. “I know what my child likes and I know what Christo likes,” Vlad says to him.

Simon Schama, the art historian, situates Christo and his projects in a long tradition, a continuum extending from Titian to Rembrandt to Miró to de Kooning.

“He won’t like the halvah.”He does not like the halvah. So they bring him a big wedge of vanilla cake with fresh whipped cream.

For the rest of the table the owner brings out cookies made by a cooperative of refugee women he sponsors from North Africa. Then espresso. Coming up on midnight.

Vlad takes most of the table home to the chateau. Wolfi drives back to the shed on the lake to work a few hours in the quiet, and to check the alarm.

At dawn it’s silent around the lake. Nothing moves but the sun.Somehow all this exists outside the punch-line postmodernism of kitsch

and performance art, outside the smooth jazz standards of mid-century living room modernism, outside earnestness or irony or intention, outside category of any kind. Somehow the installations are as intimate as they are monumen-tal, and no matter what else is happening, inside the work of art where you stand you’re safe.

The Floating Piers.Maybe the real work of an artist’s life is the artist’s life.

A month later he’s back in New York City. He works early. He works late. He’s upstairs in the studio, making the big pieces to pay for the piers. The French cuffs are dark with charcoal.

Vlad calls. Wolfi calls. Marci calls. Calls come all day every day with updates from Italy: more sections finished; more anchors sunk; bills in/checks out; trucks come/trucks go; tourists block traffic to catch a glimpse of the shed; of the piers; of Christo. The prefetto needs more paperwork. The days are tick-ticking away.

If you were to visit him, you’d meet him in that second-floor reception area. Reporters step in/reporters step out. Christo’s tired, but his eyes are bright and the handshake’s firm.

You’d smell that perfume and hear that music, and by now you’d know the perfume was Jeanne-Claude’s. Angel, by Thierry Mugler. Christo sprays it ev-ery day, upstairs and down. And the music is the Mozart she loved, the Piano Concerto No. 27, Mozart’s last, and he plays it on a loop, low, as the magic to conjure and keep her.

Then another dinner downtown. “Three kilometers,” Christo says. “Two hundred twenty thousand poly-

ethylene cubes. The Rolls-Royce of cubes. Ninety thousand square meters of fabric on the piers and in the streets.”

MAYters. He’s building the piers out of breadsticks now, laying first the long line from

Sulzano to Peschiera Maraglio, then the angles from Monte Isola to Isola di San Paolo. The little island is surrounded by carefully broken breadsticks. The piers are taken up and eaten when dinner arrives.

A couple of prawns. A bite of salad. Half a glass of red wine. “Eat,” Jonathan says.

“We sold a big one.”“How much?”“One million two.”“One point two emm?”“Yes.” Now the wedge of vanilla cake. Fresh whipped cream.

Art is not an antidote to loss. Just an answer to it. Like the painting of a woman by a lake. Like walking on water for two weeks. Years of daredevil en-gineering and unnecessary effort for something so ephemeral. He’ll make an-other trip to Italy. Then back to New York. Then Abu Dhabi. Then New York. Then Italy. More shows. More galleries. More museums. Maybe Colorado. Maybe Abu Dhabi. Maybe.

Tonight he hurries home. He’ll work late. “There is a madness of things to be done!”Such a bright, brief complication. And artists do not retire.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/journeysdanube

SMITHSONIAN.COM

mosquitoesA W O R L D W I T H O U T

BY JERRY ADLER

photographs by David Yoder

New gene-editing

technology gives

scientists the ability to wipe out the

carriers of malaria and

the Zika virus. But should

they use it?

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TO THE NAKED EYE, THE EGG OF THE Anopheles gambiae mosquito is just a dark speck, but under a 100-power microscope, it shows up as a fat, slightly curved cucumber, somewhat narrower at one end. In the wild, it is typically found in shallow, sunlit puddles in sub-Saharan Af-rica, but it can survive in any number of wet places at around 80 degrees Fahrenheit. In a laboratory in London, behind three sets of locked doors enclosing negative-pressure containment vestibules, Andrew Hammond, a doctoral student in molecular genetics, picks up a clump of Anopheles eggs on a small paint-brush and lines them up on a microscope slide. Hammond looks for the narrow end, where the germ line cells that will form the next generation are located. With delicate nudges of a joystick, he maneuvers a tiny needle through his field of vision until it just penetrates the egg membrane, and the click of a button releases a minute squirt of DNA. Whether the genetic material reaches and binds to its target region is then a matter of luck, and luck is, generally, with the mosquito. Hammond’s success rate, of which he is very proud, is around 20 percent.

A. gambiae has been called the world’s most dangerousanimal, although strictly speaking that applies only to the fe-male of the species, which does the bloodsucking and harms only indirectly. Its bite is a minor nuisance, unless it happens to convey the malaria parasite, Plasmodium falciparum, for which it is a primary human vector. Although a huge inter-national effort has cut malaria mortality by about half since 2000, the World Health Organization still estimates there were more than 400,000 fatal cases in 2015, primarily in Af-rica. Children are particularly susceptible. The Bill and Me-linda Gates Foundation prioritized malaria in its more than $500 million commitment to fight infectious disease in devel-oping countries. A portion of that money ends up here, in the laboratory of Andrea Crisanti at Imperial College, London, a short walk from Harrods.

Crisanti, a tousled, sad-eyed man with a gentle smile, was trained as a physician in Rome. Later, studying molecular biol-ogy in Heidelberg, he developed his lifelong interest in malaria. He set out on the trail of A. gambiae some 30 years ago, after he concluded that the best way to eradicate the disease was to attack the mosquito rather than the parasite. “The vector is the

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Achilles’ heel of the disease,” he says in his soft Italian accent. “If you go after the pathogen [with drugs], all you are doing is generating resistance.”

Humans have been at war with members of the family Culici-dae for over a century, since the pioneering epidemiologist Sir Ronald Ross proved the role of Anopheles in malaria and U.S. Army Maj. Walter Reed made a similar discovery about Aedes aegypti and yellow fever. The war has been waged with shovels and insecticides, with mosquito repellent, mosquito traps and mosquito-larvae-eating fish, with bed nets and window screens and rolled-up newspapers. But all of these approaches are self-limiting. Puddles fill up again with rain; insects evolve resistance to pesticides; predators can eat only so much.

By the time Crisanti joined Imperial College, in 1994, mo-lecular genetics had suggested a new approach, which he was quick to adopt, and in which his lab is now among the most advanced in the world. Scientists had discovered how to insert beneficial mutations—such as the gene for Bt, a natural insecti-cide—into agricultural crops such as corn. Why not, then, cre-

Above: Mosquito larvae hatch

in Perugia. Since mosquitoes

reproduce quickly, a gene drive

can spread through an entire

population in just a few months.

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ate a lethal mutation and insert it into the DNA of a mosquito? One problem was that mosquitoes weren’t bred in a factory, as commodity corn increasingly is. In the wild, mosquitoes mate randomly and propagate by Mendelian inheritance, which dictates that a mutation spreads slowly, if at all. Unless the man-made mutation conveyed some strong evolutionary ad-vantage—and the whole point was to do the opposite—it would most likely disappear.

In 2003, Austin Burt, a colleague of Crisanti’s at Imperial Col-lege, suggested a solution: coupling the desired mutation with a “gene drive” that would overwrite the ordinary processes of in-heritance and evolution. Recall that genes are spelled out by DNA sequences woven into chromosomes, which come in pairs (23 pairs in a human, 3 in a mosquito). A “gene drive” involves copy-ing a mutated gene from one chromosome onto the other mem-ber of the pair. The key is that when the pairs split to form the eggs and sperm, it won’t matter which chromosome gets passed along—the engineered gene will be there either way. Thus a single mutation would, in theory, be “driven” into practically every mos-quito in a breeding population.

For the next dozen years, Crisanti, working with a senior re-search fellow named Tony Nolan and others, obsessively pur-sued variations of this approach, designing one gene mutation that would render females sterile and another that would lead to a huge preponderance of males. The challenge was creating the particular gene drives that duplicated those mutations—a tedious, years-long process of constructing custom DNA-snip-ping enzymes.

Then, in 2012, the UC Berkeley researcher Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues developed a revolutionary new technique for editing DNA. Researchers had known for years that certain genes in bacteria had short, repeating chunks of DNA. (CRISPR stands for “clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats.”) When a virus invaded, the bacteria copied part of the virus’ genetic code, slotting it into the spaces between the re-peating CRISPR chunks. The next time the bacteria saw that piece of code, an enzyme called Cas9 would guide its RNA to ex-actly that sequence in the gene of the invading virus. It would cut out the DNA with incredible precision and fuse the strand back together. Doudna and her colleagues harnessed this process in

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the lab, using it to quickly and easily edit any part of a gene they targeted. The following year, separate teams led by MIT bioengi-neer Feng Zhang and Harvard’s George Church showed it would work in living cells.

It was the universality as well as the accuracy that set CRISPR-Cas9 apart from other gene-editing techniques. Unlike the cus-tom enzymes Crisanti and his team had been painstakingly building, Cas9 seemed to work in any type of cell. Researchers saw implications for treating genetic disorders, for improving agriculture—and for more sinister applications, such as creat-ing biowarfare agents. CRISPR also brought Crisanti’s dream a giant step closer to reality. Now, he and his team could program Cas9’s guide RNA to pinpoint any part of a gene and transfer over the material they wanted to copy.

If Crisanti’s approach works, you could, in theory, wipe out an entire species of mosquito. You could wipe out every species of mosquito, although you’d need to do them one at a time, and there are around 3,500 of them, of which only about 100 spread human disease. You might want to stop at fewer than a dozen species in three genera—Anopheles (translation: “useless,” the malaria mosquito), Aedes (translation: “unpleasant,” the princi-pal vector for yellow fever, dengue and Zika) and Culex (trans-lation: “gnat,” responsible for spreading West Nile, St. Louis encephalitis and other viruses).

For thousands of years, the relentlessly expanding popula-tion of Homo sapiens has driven other species to extinction by eating them, shooting them, destroying their habitat or acci-dentally introducing more successful competitors to their en-vironment. But never have scientists done so deliberately, un-der the auspices of public health. The possibility raises three difficult questions: Would it work? Is it ethical? Could it have unforeseen consequences?

The feasibility question is being studied in Crisanti’s London lab, where the injected eggs will hatch into larvae. The ones harboring the mutation are identified by a “marker” gene, which glows under a microscope when viewed in certain lights. The mutants of interest are then returned to the warm, humid air of the mosquito rooms, to stacked trays with walls of white plastic mesh. On one side, there’s a long socklike tube, ordi-

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narily tied in a knot, through which researchers can insert an aspirator to gently vacuum up specimens. If you hold your hand nearby, the females, sensing the nearness of blood, gather on that side. When it’s time for their blood meal, which will nourish the hundred or so eggs a female will lay at one time, an anesthetized mouse is laid belly-down on the cage roof, and the females fly up to bite it through the mesh. (The males, which live on nectar and fruit in the wild, feed on a glucose-water solution, wicked up from a small glass bottle.) These insects live up to a month longer in the controlled environment of the cages than in the wild, where they often don’t survive more than a week or two.

The next phase of the research takes place in Perugia, Italy, home to one of the world’s oldest universities, founded in 1308, and to a small, elite research consortium, Polo d’Innovazione Genomica. A few miles from the winding alleys of the medieval hilltop village, in a glass-walled building on a stark windswept plaza, is Polo’s secure lab, with six ceiling-high “field cages,” each with an area of 50 or 60 square feet. Signs on the doors

In a study published last year,

Andrea Crisanti, right, and his

colleagues were able to spread an

infertility mutation to 75 percent of

a mosquito population.

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warn away visitors who might have been exposed to malaria, since they could infect an escaped mosquito if it bit them. The air inside is tropical. Instead of live mice, females are fed on small dishes of bovine blood, warmed to body temperature and covered with paraffin, to give them something to land on. The females are attracted to the pheromones in human sweat, espe-cially from the feet. Lab workers say they sometimes wear their socks all weekend and bring them to work on Monday to rub on the feeding dishes.

Inside, the lighting changes to simulate a 24-hour tropical day, and environmental cues trigger the swarming behavior that is crucial to mating. “That is how many insects mate,” ex-plains the chief entomologist, Clelia Oliva. “The males swarm, and the females fly through the swarm and find a mate, and they come together in the air. If you cannot replicate that, you cannot determine if your line is going to succeed in the wild.” An escapee from one of the cages flits past Oliva as she is talk-ing, and she dispatches it with the slap she perfected while studying mosquitoes on Reunion Island, in the Indian Ocean.

Researchers are skeptical about whether it is even possible to wipe out mosquitoes. “Global elimination of an entire species, I think, is a little far-fetched,” says Steven Juliano, an ecologist at Illinois State University. But, he adds, “I think they have a good chance of reducing local populations, maybe even eradicating a species in a locality.”

Something like that has been done with other creatures. Starting in the 1950s, the American entomologists Edward F. Knipling and Raymond C. Bushland eliminated the screw-worm, an agricultural pest, from the United States and much of Central America. Their approach, called “sterile insect tech-nique,” involved breeding and hatching millions of flies, steril-izing the males with low-level gamma rays, then releasing them in numbers sufficient to swamp the wild population. Females that mated with the sterile males produced infertile offspring. It took decades, but it worked—the two men were awarded the World Food Prize in 1992—and the same technique now is used to contain outbreaks of the Mediterranean fruit fly.

But when the sterile insect technique was tried against mosquitoes, the results were mixed. It requires that the re-leased males compete successfully with their wild counter-

“We can remake the

biosphere to be what

we want, from woolly

mammoths to nonbiting mosquitoes. How should

we feel about that?”

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parts in mating, and there is evidence that in mosquitoes, the same radiation that makes them sterile may also im-pair their mating behavior. Whatever female mosquitoes are looking for in a mate, these males seem to have less of it.

So researchers have also been looking at variants of ster-ile insect technology that don’t require radiation. A pilot project has begun in the city of Piracicaba, in southeastern Brazil, by the British biotech company Oxitec. The target in-sect is A. aegypti, the main culprit in spreading yellow fever, dengue and other viral diseases, and the work has taken on greater urgency in the last six months, because A. aegypti also is a vector for the Zika virus, blamed for an outbreak of terrifying birth defects in the Americas.

In Oxitec’s program, male larvae bred with a lethal muta-tion are raised in water dosed with the antibiotic tetracy-cline, which inactivates the lethal gene. When those males mate with wild mosquitoes, their offspring, deprived of tet-racycline, die before they can reproduce. CEO Hadyn Parry claims “greater than 90 percent suppression of the wild population” in five studies that covered relatively small ar-eas in Brazil, Panama and the Cayman Islands. Now the company wants to expand to the subtropical U.S., and it re-cently passed a key regulatory hurdle to bring the program to the Florida Keys.

Oxitec’s technology predates CRISPR, and it doesn’t use a gene drive. Its goal is not to exterminate Aedes, but to reduce the local population to where it can no longer serve as a vec-tor for human disease. That is, of course, a temporary solu-tion to a perennial problem. Mosquitoes don’t usually travel more than a few hundred yards from where they hatch, but people do, and they can take yellow fever with them. And the mosquitoes themselves can travel the globe on airplanes and ships. Aedes albopictus, the “Asian tiger mosquito,” arrived in the Western Hemisphere a few years ago, possibly in a shipment of tires, and spreads many of the same diseases as A. aegypti. So even if the Oxitec program succeeds, it will likely need to be repeated at intervals. “You begin to see why Oxitec is a business,” one American entomologist said dryly.

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Anopheles mosquitoes (shown here in

the Perugia lab) exist on every continent

apart from Antarctica, but most malaria-

related deaths take place in Africa.

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There’s not much doubt that eradicating Anopheles gambiae and Aedes aegypti would save many lives, and for most people that’s a good enough reason to do it. “I don’t think the world would be a worse-off place if local populations of these species were eliminated,” Juliano says, “and it wouldn’t bother me any more than eliminating the smallpox virus.” Even the great conserva-tionist E.O. Wilson, the world’s most famous entomologist, has said he wouldn’t mourn A. gambiae. “Keep their DNA for future research,” he says, “and let them go.”

Still, there are voices calling to proceed slowly. “If we were to intentionally set out to cause the extinction of a species, we should think about that,” says Henry Greely, a Stanford law pro-fessor and bioethicist. “I would want there to be some consid-eration and reflection, and a social consensus, before we take that step.” His argument is based partly on the slippery slope: If mosquitoes, then why not rats? “I’m not sure I care if mosquitoes suffer, if they can suffer. But mammals or birds, I do care.”

But suppose the target were the malaria parasite itself, which as a single-celled protozoan has even a smaller claim on our sympathy than an insect? At UC Irvine, Anthony James, a ge-neticist, has been working since the 1980s on breeding mos-quitoes that, while viable themselves, do not transmit P. falci-parum. The virus has a complicated life cycle that takes up to three weeks to move from the mosquito’s gut to its circulatory system to the salivary glands, from which it is transmitted. James real-ized that if he could endow the mosquito with genes that produce antibodies to P. falciparum, he could destroy the parasite without having to kill even one insect. He created the gene for the antibod-ies, but he needed a way to make it spread in the wild.

Then he heard about CRISPR-Cas9—in particular the work being done at UC San Diego by a molecular biologist named Ethan Bier, who recently put a mutation into fruit flies. Bier al-lows that some situations might warrant removing a genus like A. aegypti from a vast area of the world where it isn’t native. Whenever possible, though, he prefers less-invasive methods. “I like this approach, of modifying the mosquitoes rather than rendering them extinct,” says Bier. “We’re doing enough of that already. As a human being I don’t want to be involved in the eradication of a species, even an insect.” James has success-fully engineered the antibody-producing genes and is working

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on the gene drive. He could have insects ready for field tests in a matter of months but can’t predict how long the approval pro-cess will take. “We’re not about to do anything foolish,” he says.

If society chooses to eliminate one or more species of mos-quito, what are the downsides? Mosquitoes play a critical role in a few environments, such as the Arctic tundra, where they hatch out by the billions over a short period and are a significant food resource for birds. In most other places, biologists believe, the ecosystem could survive the loss .

Still, according to Nolan, “Our goal is not to eliminate malaria mosquitoes from the face of the earth. If we succeed, people won’t even notice. There will be plenty of mosquitoes out there.”

It’s possible, even likely, that another species would take the place of the mosquitoes we exterminated. For instance, A. ae-gypti could be replaced by a mosquito from the Culex pipiens species complex. Culex, which is a vector for the West Nile virus, “does very badly when Aedes is present,” Juliano notes, but it might be expected to thrive in its absence. On the other hand, the newcomer might be a relatively harmless species; the ecological niche for mosquitoes doesn’t require them to carry diseases fatal to human beings. In the long term, the pathogens could evolve to be spread by the mosquitoes that are still around, but there’s plenty of time for humans to worry about that.

The larger concern, arguably, is over the use of CRISPR itself, and the awesome power it unleashes over the environment. “We can remake the biosphere to be what we want, from woolly mam-moths to nonbiting mosquitoes,” Greely muses. “How should we feel about that? Do we want to live in nature, or in Disney-land?” Another fear is that CRISPR puts a potential weapon in the hands of terrorists, who could use it to engineer epidemics. “Just as gene drives can make mosquitoes unfit for spreading the malaria parasite, they could conceivably be designed with gene drives carrying cargo for delivering lethal bacterial toxins to humans,” warns David Gurwitz of Tel Aviv University.

The National Academies of Science, Engineering and Med-icine thought enough of the threat to convene a conference last fall on the implications of gene drive technology for bio- security. But many scientists think this is an overblown concern (along with the other horror-movie scenario, of a high-school

Malaria alone accounts for

60% of mosquito-

related deaths. Fatality rates are especially

high among young children.

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student in his basement using CRISPR to make a dog that glows in the dark). “A gene drive in a mosquito would make a very poor bioweapon,” says Kevin Esvelt, an ecologist at MIT, who has writ-ten extensively on the subject. “They are slow [compared with disseminating a deadly microbe], they are easy to detect, and it’s straightforward to build a reversal mechanism.”

But Esvelt has other ethical concerns about using CRISPR tech-nology on animals: “We will have engineered the ecosystems of people elsewhere in the world without their knowledge or consent. We go from the default assumption that the things we engineer will not spread, to assuming they will. Normally you can make any kind of fruit flies you want—natural selection will wipe the floor with them. But as soon as you’re thinking of a gene drive technol-ogy, you have to assume whatever you’re making will spread once it gets outside the lab. Human error will win out, if not deliberate human action.”

Yet Esvelt himself is already thinking about whether and how to someday use a CRISPR gene drive in a mouse, the main animal reservoir of Lyme disease—and a mammal. He would engineer a local population to carry antibodies for the bacteria that cause Lyme. (The disease spreads from mice to humans through tick bites.)

If CRISPR works in a mouse, it will almost certainly work in a human being. The least controversial application would be for inherited diseases such as muscular dystrophy—which would most likely involve repairing the somatic (non-reproduc-tive) cells of a child or an adult. But Chinese scientists just an-nounced the results of their second study of CRISPR in human embryos. (They used nonviable embryos from fertility clinics.) The results revealed “serious obstacles” to the approach, but the technology is fast improving. Harvard scientists, for instance, recently modified the CRISPR method so it can change a single letter of the genetic code, making it easier to prevent diseases like Alzheimer’s and breast cancer. CRISPR also opens the Pan-dora’s box of editing the germ line cells that pass on their genetic material to succeeding generations. This could be of enormous benefit to a small number of people who carry genes for dis-orders such as Huntington’s disease. More problematically, it could encourage parents to custom-build their offspring, delet-ing genes that are unwanted but not life-threatening (for lactose

It was human technology that spread

these diseases across the globe, and

now technol-ogy is offering

a way to contain them,

or even defeat them

altogether.

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intolerance, say), or adding ones that convey traits such as ath-letic ability, longevity—or intelligence.

This possibility has given rise to a lot of op-ed angst about “playing God,” which certainly should be taken seriously. Leav-ing aside the philosophic objections, the practical downside is that we don’t know all of the genes that will actually make someone smarter (or taller, stronger, healthier, faster and so forth) and the only way to find out for sure is to try different combinations on various embryos and wait for them to grow up. By that time, if we got it wrong, it would be too late to fix, not least for the humans who were the unwitting subjects of the experiments.

That, in the eyes of most ethicists, is an insurmountable problem. An International Summit on Human Gene Editing in Washington, D.C. last December aired many of these issues, revealing a split between the medical community, which wants to help patients in the here and now, and some researchers, who worry about the implications of the tabloid headline an-nouncing the birth of the first Frankenbaby.

Meanwhile, mosquitoes flit about the villages and cities of cen-tral Africa, land silently on sleeping children and bite. The fight against malaria has made much progress in the last decade, but at a huge cost that may not be sustainable indefinitely. In the West-ern Hemisphere, the threat of Zika has led to extraordinary mea-sures, including warnings in whole regions of South and Central America for women to consider postponing childbearing. This summer will tell us if the disease will strike in the parts of the U.S. where two Aedes species live—Florida and a strip of the Gulf Coast that is likely to expand as the winters warm in a changing climate. (The second of those two American Aedes species, A. al-bopictus, is a confirmed carrier of the virus and can be found as far north as New England.) Public-health officials are already bracing for the possibility of a spate of babies with the devastating diagno-sis of microcephaly and associated brain damage. It was human transportation technology that spread these diseases across the globe. Now technology is offering a way to contain them, or even defeat them altogether, at the risk of unleashing powerful forces whose effects we can only dimly predict.

Will we do it—we humans, the species with the relentless ap-petite for knowledge? The fruit of that particular tree has never

W H E N A N I M A L S K I L L

Snakes and sharks may be the stuff of nightmares, but they cause far fewer deaths than parasites and viruses carried by mosquitoes. Here are some dangerous animals and the estimated annual deaths they’ve caused in recent years.

Mosquitoes Transmit malaria and other diseases

725,000 deaths globally per year

Snakes94,000 to 125,000

Freshwater SnailsTransmit schistosomiasis20,000 to 200,000

DogsMostly by transmitting rabies55,000 to 60,000

Triatomine bugsTransmit Chagas disease 10,000

Scorpions3,250

Sharks6

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been left uneaten for very long. Crisanti, for his part, is ready to pick it. “I want to see malaria wiped out in my lifetime,” he says softly. He is 61.

T H E B U Z Z A BO U T A LT E R E D B U G SHow the revolutionary technique CRISPR-Cas9 gives scientists the ability to insert an infertility gene into a mosquito—so the gene “drives” into a population, eventually causing its demise

M U TA N T M O S Q U I TO

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D G

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WIL

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Scientists create genetic code that disrupts reproduction in female mosquitoes and inject the custom DNA into a fertilized mosquito egg.

As the insect develops, the engineered gene is incorporated into the cells that generate sperm in males and eggs in females.

When an altered mosquito mates with a wild insect, their offspring’s chromosomes are paired. The engineered DNA comes with a highly targeted editing enzyme, which helps insert the alteration into the wild chromosome.

With the altered gene on both chromosomes, it will become more prevalent in a popula-tion (in contrast to natu-ral mutations that lack the gene drive mecha-nism). The altered gene (shown as a circle, right) is carried by male mos-quitoes (orange), which remain fertile. Females that inherit the altera-tion from both parents are sterile.

E N G I N E E R I N G T H E G E N E

D OW N T H E G E N E R AT I O N S

Now both chromo-somes in the pair

carry the mutation.

The Cas9 enzyme snips out a gene on

the wild chromosome.

A mosquito inherits one chromosome from each parent.

The wild chromosome repairs itself, with the

altered gene as a template.

Mosquitoes have three pairs of chromosomes total (humans have 23), but a sperm or egg cell contains just one member of each chromosome pair. In an altered insect, the engineered gene (in orange) is now part of a chromosome in the sperm or egg.

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Even amid the carnage of World War I, the battle in the northern Italian mountains was like nothing the world had ever seen—or has seen since

B Y B R I A N M O C K E N H A U P T

B L O O D

I N T H E

C L O U D S

photographs by Stefen Chow

Two Italian soldiers dodged sniper fire and blasted rock while scaling the Tofana di Rozes to seize a position overlooking Austrian troops.

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Just after dawn we slipped into the forest and hiked a steep trail to a limestone wall. A curious ladder of U-shaped steel rungs was fixed to the rock. To reach the battlefield we would trek sev-eral miles along this via ferrata, or iron road,

pathways of cables and lad-ders that traverse some of the most stunning and oth-erwise inaccessible territory in the mountains of northern Italy. We scaled the 50 feet of steel rungs, stopping ev-ery ten feet or so to clip our safety tethers to metal cables that run alongside.

A half-hour in, our faces slick with sweat, we rested on an outcropping that overlooked a valley car-peted with thick stands of pine and fir. Sheep bleated in a meadow, and a shep-herd called to them. We could see the Pasubio Ossu-ary, a stone tower that holds

Austrian soldiers won the

race to the high ground

(below, in 1915) in what

was later called “The

White War” because of the

snow and extreme cold.

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the remains of 5,000 Italian and Austrian soldiers who fought in these mountains in World War I. The previous night we had slept near the ossuary, along a country road where cowbells clanged softly and lightning bugs blinked in the darkness like muzzle flashes.

Joshua Brandon gazed at the surrounding peaks and took a swig of water. “We’re in one of the most beautiful places in the world,” he said, “and one of the most horrible.”

In the spring of 1916, the Austrians swept down through these mountains. Had they reached the Venetian plain, they could have marched on Venice and encircled much of the Italian Army, break-ing what had been a bloody yearlong stalemate. But the Italians stopped them here.

Just below us a narrow road skirted the mountainside, the Ital-ians’ Road of 52 Tunnels, a four-mile donkey path, a third of which runs inside the mountains, built by 600 workers over ten months in 1917.

“A beautiful piece of engineering, but what a wasteful need,” said Chris Simmons, the third member of our group.

Joshua grunted. “Just to pump a bunch of men up a hill to get slaughtered.”

For the next two hours our trail alternated between heady climbing on rock faces and mellow hiking along the mountain ridge. By mid-morning the fog and low clouds had cleared, and before us lay the battlefield, its slopes scored with trenches and stone shelters, the summits laced with tunnels where men lived like moles. We had all served in the military, Chris as a Navy corpsman attached to the Marine Corps, and Joshua and I with the Army infantry. Both Joshua and I had fought in Iraq, but we had never known war like this.

Our path joined the main road, and we hiked through a bu-colic scene, blue skies and grassy fields, quiet save for the sheep and the birds. Two young chamois scampered onto a boulder and watched us. What this had once been strained the imagina-tion: the road crowded with men and animals and wagons, the air rank with filth and death, the din of explosions and gunfire.

“Think of how many soldiers walked the same steps we’re walking and had to be carried out,” Joshua said. We passed a hill-side cemetery framed by a low stone wall and overgrown with tall grass and wildflowers. Most of its occupants had reached the battlefield in July of 1916 and died over the following weeks.

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They at least had been recovered; hundreds more still rest where they fell, others blown to pieces and never recovered.

On a steep slope not far from here, an archaeologist named Franco Nicolis helped excavate the remains of three Italian soldiers found in 2011. “Italian troops from the bottom of the valley were trying to conquer the top,” he had told us at his of-fice in Trento, which belonged to Austria-Hungary before the war and to Italy afterward. “These soldiers climbed up to the trench, and they were waiting for dawn. They already had their sunglasses, because they were attacking to the east.”

The sun rose, and the Austrians spotted and killed them.“In the official documents, the meaning is, ‘Attack failed.’

Nothing more. This is the official truth. But there is another truth, that three young Italian soldiers died in this context,” Nicolis said. “For us, it’s a historical event. But for them, how did

After their fierce defense of

the Castelletto (background),

Austrian soldiers called it the

Schreckenstein, meaning the

“Rock of Terror.”

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they think about their position? When a soldier took the train to the front, was he thinking, ‘Oh my God, I’m going to the front of the First World War, the biggest event ever’? No, he was think-ing, ‘This is my life.’ ”

As Joshua, Chris and I walked through the saddle between the Austrian and Italian positions, Chris spotted something odd nes-tled in the loose rocks. For nearly two decades he has worked as a professional climbing and skiing guide, and years of studying the landscape as he hikes has honed his eye for detail. In previous days he found a machine gun bullet, a steel ball from a mortar shell and a jagged strip of shrapnel. Now he squatted in the gravel and gently picked up a thin white wedge an inch wide and long as a finger. He cradled it in his palm, unsure what to do with this piece of skull.

The Italians came late to the war. In the spring of 1915, they abandoned their alliance with Austria-Hungary and Germany to join the United Kingdom, France and Russia, hoping for sev-eral chunks of Austria at the war’s end. An estimated 600,000 Italians and 400,000 Austrians would die on the Italian Front, many of them in a dozen battles along the Isonzo River in the far northeast. But the front zigzagged 400 miles—nearly as long as the Western Front, in France and Belgium—and much of that crossed rugged mountains, where the fighting was like none the world had ever seen, or has seen since.

Soldiers had long manned alpine frontiers to secure bor-ders or marched through high passes en route to invasion. But never had the mountains themselves been the battlefield, and for fighting at this scale, with fearsome weapons and physical feats that would humble many mountaineers. As New York

“If you do not die from hunger or cold, then someday soon you will be blown into the air. The Castelletto must be held.

It will be held to the death.”

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World correspondent E. Alexander Powell wrote in 1917: “On no front, not on the sun-scorched plains of Mesopotamia, nor in the frozen Mazurian marshes, nor in the blood-soaked mud of Flanders, does the fighting man lead so arduous an existence as up here on the roof of the world.”

The destruction of World War I overwhelms. Nine million dead. Twenty-one million wounded. The massive frontal assaults, the anonymous soldier, faceless death—against this backdrop, the mountain war in Italy was a battle of small units, of individuals. In subzero temperatures men dug miles of tunnels and caverns through glacial ice. They strung cableways up mountainsides and stitched rock faces with rope ladders to move soldiers onto the high peaks, then hauled up an arsenal of industrial warfare: heavy artillery and mortars, machine guns, poison gas and flamethrowers.

Ultimately, the fighting (an

Italian trench in the Pasubio

Mountains) served as a

sideshow for other battles that

determined the war’s outcome.

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Italy entered World War I in May 1915, turning on its ex-ally Austria-Hungary. The fighting soon devolved into trench warfare in the northeast and alpine combat in the north.

The Italian Front

Bitter BattlesA June 1915-March 1916

The Italians launch the first five Battles of the Isonzo, attempts to cross the Isonzo River in the hope of taking Trieste. Throughout the war, fighting along the river will claim some 300,000 Italian casualties and 200,000 Austrian.

B April 17, 1916The Italians detonate five tons of explosives under Austrians holding the Col di Lana, shattering 10,000 tons of rock, killing 100 to 200 Austrians—and still failing to take a strategic pass in the Dolomites.

C May 15-June 10, 1916The Austrians mount the Trentino Offensive— also called the “Punishment Expedition,” intended to avenge the Italians’ betrayal. The mountain attack rocks the Italians back some 12 miles before they halt the Austrians at Monte Pasubio, where the two armies are stalemated on adjoining peaks. The Austrians suffer 150,000 casualties, the Italians 147,000.

D August 1916-September 1917The next six Battles of the Isonzo produce little gain for either side, but both sides are nearly spent.

E June 10-29, 1917The Italians attack along a broad front in the mountains, and, in hand-to-hand combat, take Mount Ortigara—which the Austrians promptly retake. Italian casualties: 23,000. Austrian: 9,000.

F October 24-November 19, 1917In the Battle of Caporetto, Austrian and German forces push the Italians back some 60 miles and take 270,000 prisoners.

G June 15-23, 1918The Austrians—without German help—assail the Italians in the Battle of the Piave River, but they get nowhere and suffer some 150,000 casualties.

H October 23-November 2, 1918The Italians crush the Austrians in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto, taking some 300,000 prisoners and ending fighting on the Italian Front.

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And they used the terrain itself as a weapon, rolling boul-ders to crush attackers and sawing through snow cornices with ropes to trigger avalanches. Storms, rock slides and natural avalanches—the “white death”—killed plenty more. After heavy snowfalls in December of 1916, avalanches bur-ied 10,000 Italian and Austrian troops over just two days.

Yet the Italian mountain war remains today one of the least-known battlefields of the Great War.

“Most people have no idea what happened here,” Joshua said one afternoon as we sat atop an old bunker on a moun-tainside. Until recently, that included him as well. The little he knew came from Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms,

Storming the CastellettoMay 1915-July 1916: German, then Austrian, troops occupy a blade of rock called the Castelletto, depriving the Italians of a major supply route for an attack throughout the Dolomites. After a year’s futile shelling, the Italians tunnel under the rock and blast it into shards.

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and later reading Erwin Rommel, the famed Desert Fox of World War II, who had fought in the Italian Alps as a young officer in World War I.

Joshua, who is 38, studied history at the Citadel and under-stands the theory of war, but he also served three tours in Iraq. He wears a beard now, trimmed short and speckled with gray, and his 5-foot-9 frame is wiry, better for hauling himself up steep cliffs and trekking through the wilderness. In Iraq he had bulked to nearly 200 pounds, thick muscle for sprinting down alleyways, carrying wounded comrades and, on one afternoon, fighting hand-to-hand. He excelled in battle, for which he was awarded the Silver Star and two Bronze Stars with Valor. But he struggled at home, feeling both alienated from American society

and mentally wrung out from combat. In 2012 he left the Army as a major and sought solace in the outdoors. He found that rock climbing and mountaineer-ing brought him peace and perspective even as it mimicked the best parts of his military career: some risk, trusting others with his life, a shared sense of mission.

Once he understood the skill needed to travel and survive in mountains, he looked at the alpine war in Italy with fresh eyes. How, he wondered, had the Italians and Austrians lived and fought in such unforgiving terrain?

Chris, who is 43, met Joshua four years ago at a rock gym in Washington State, where they both live, and now climb together often. I met Joshua three years ago at an ice-climbing event in Montana and Chris a year later on a climbing trip in the Cascade Moun-tains. Our shared military experience and love of the mountains led us to ex-plore these remote battlefields, like touring Gettysburg if it sat atop a jag-ged peak at 10,000 feet. “You can’t get

An Austrian cannon

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to many of these fighting positions without using the skills of a climber,” Joshua said, “and that allows you to have an intimacy that you might not otherwise.”

If the Italian Front is largely forgotten elsewhere, the war is ever-present across northern Italy, etched into the land. The moun-tains and valleys are lined with trenches and dotted with stone fortresses. Rusted strands of barbed wire sprout from the earth, crosses built from battlefield detritus rise from mountaintops, and piazza monuments celebrate the heroes and the dead.

“We are living together with our deep history,” Nicolis, the researcher, told us. “The war is still in our lives.” Between climbs to isolated battlefields, we had stopped in Trento to meet with Nicolis, who directs the Archaeological Heritage Office for Trentino Province. We had spent weeks before our trip reading histories of the war in Italy and had brought a stack of maps and guidebooks; we knew what had happened and where, but from Nicolis we sought more on who and why. He is a leading voice in what he calls “grandfather archae- ology,” a consideration of history and memory told in family lore. His grandfather fought for Italy, his wife’s grandfather for Austria-Hungary, a common story in this region.

Nicolis, who is 59, specialized in prehistory until he found World War I artifacts while excavating a Bronze Age smelting site on an al-pine plateau a decade ago. Ancient and modern, side by side. “This was the first step,” he said. “I began to think about archaeology as a discipline of the very recent past.”

By the time he broadened his focus, many World War I sites had been picked over for scrap metal or souvenirs. The scavenging continues—treasure hunters recently used a helicopter to hoist a cannon from a mountaintop—and climate change has hastened the revelation of what remains, including bodies long buried in ice on the highest battlefields.

On the Presena Glacier, Nicolis helped recover the bodies of two Austrian soldiers discovered in 2012. They had been buried in a crevasse, but the glacier was 150 feet higher a century ago; as it shrank, the men emerged from the ice, bones inside tat-tered uniforms. The two skulls, both found amid blond hair, had shrapnel holes, the metal still rattling around inside. One of the skulls had eyes as well. “It was as if he was looking at me and not

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vice versa,” Nicolis said. “I was thinking about their families, their mothers. Goodbye my son. Please come back soon. And they completely disappeared, as if they never existed. These are what I call the silent witnesses, the missing witnesses.”

At an Austrian position in a tunnel on Punta Linke, at nearly 12,000 feet, Nicolis and his colleagues chipped away and melted the ice, finding, among other artifacts, a wooden bucket filled with sauerkraut, an unsent letter, newspaper clippings and a pile of straw overshoes, woven in Austria by Russian prisoners to shield soldiers’ feet from the bitter cold. The team of historians, moun-taineers and archaeologists restored the site to what it might have been a century ago, a sort of living history for those who make the long journey by cable car and a steep hike.

“We cannot just speak and write as archaeologists,” Nicolis said. “We have to use other languages: narrative, poetry, dance, art.” On the curved white walls of the Museum of Modern and Contempo-rary Art in Rovereto, battlefield artifacts found by Nicolis and his colleagues were presented without explanation, a cause for con-templation. Helmets and crampons, mess kits, hand grenades and pieces of clothing hang in vertical rows of five items, each row set above a pair of empty straw overshoes. The effect was stark and haunting, a soldier deconstructed. “When I saw the final version,” Nicolis told us, “I said, ‘Oh my God, this means I am present. Here I am. This is a person.’ ”

When Joshua stood before the exhibit, he thought of his own dead, friends and soldiers who’d served under him, each memo-rialized at ceremonies with a battle cross: a rifle with bayonet struck in the ground muzzle-down between empty combat boots, a helmet atop the rifle butt. Artifacts over empty shoes. I am pres-ent. Here I am.

The sky threatened rain, and low clouds wrapped us in a chilly haze. I stood with Joshua on a table-size patch of level rock, half-way up a 1,800-foot face on Tofana di Rozes, an enormous gray massif near the Austrian border. Below us a wide valley stretched to a dozen more steep peaks. We had been on the wall six hours al-ready, and we had another six to go.

As Chris climbed 100 feet overhead, a golf ball-size chunk of rock popped loose and zinged past us with a high-pitched whir like whizzing shrapnel. Joshua and I traded glances and chuckled.

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The trenches remain (bottom left, an Austrian position in the Pasubio mountains), but the alpine battlefields have been scavenged for a century. Still, more artifacts—and remains—are coming to light as glaciers recede, providing an intimate glimpse into an industrialized war. In 2012, archaeologist Franco Nicolis (top left) helped recover the skull of a soldier whose eyes had been preserved in the cold. “It was as if he was looking at me and not vice versa,” he says. A cigarette box (middle left) had a soldier’s drawing inside. World War I relics he and others collected were shown at a contemporary art museum (above) without labels, as objects for contemplation.

Hell in a Very Cold Place

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The Tofana di Rozes towers over a 700-foot-tall blade of rock called the Castelletto, or Little Castle. In 1915 a single platoon of Germans occupied the Castelletto, and with a machine gun they had littered the valley with dead Italians. “The result was star-tling: In all directions wounded horses racing, people running from the forest, frightened to death,” a soldier named Gunther Langes recalled of one attack. “The sharpshooters caught them with their rifle scopes, and their bullets did a great job. So an Ital-ian camp bled to death at the foot of the mountain.” More and better-armed Austrians replaced the Germans, cutting off a major potential supply route and muddling Italian plans to push north into Austria-Hungary.

Conquering the Castelletto fell to the Alpini, Italy’s mountain troops, known by their dashing felt hats adorned with a black ra-ven feather. One thought was that if they could climb the Tofana’s face to a small ledge hundreds of feet above the Austrians’ strong-hold, they could hoist up a machine gun, even a small artillery piece, and fire down on them. But the route—steep, slick with run-off and exposed to enemy fire—was beyond the skill of most. The assignment went to Ugo Vallepiana and Giuseppe Gaspard, two Alpini with a history of daring climbs together. Starting in a deep alcove, out of Austrian view, they worked up the Tofana di Rozes, wearing hemp-soled shoes that offered better traction than their hobnailed boots and dampened the sounds of their movements.

We were climbing a route not far from theirs, with Chris and Joshua alternating the lead. One would climb up about 100 feet, and along the way slide special cams into cracks and nooks, then clip the protective gear to the rope with a carabiner, a metal loop with a spring-loaded arm. In other places, they clipped the rope to a piton, a steel wedge with an open circle at the end pounded into the rock by previous climbers. If they slipped, they might drop 20 feet instead of hundreds, and the climbing rope would stretch to absorb a fall.

Vallepiana and Gaspard had none of this specialized equip-ment. Even the carabiner, a climbing essential invented shortly before the war, was unknown to most soldiers. Instead, Gaspard used a technique that makes my stomach quiver: Each time he hammered in a piton, he untied the rope from around his waist, threaded it through the metal loop, and retied it. And their hemp ropes could just as easily snap as catch a fall.

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As we neared the top of our climb, I hoisted myself onto a four-foot lip and passed through a narrow chute to another ledge. Joshua, farther ahead and out of sight, had anchored himself to a rock and pulled in my rope as I moved. Chris was 12 feet behind me, and still on a lower level, exposed from the chest up.

I stepped onto the ledge and felt it give way.“Rock!” I shouted, and snapped my head to see my formerly

solid step now broken free and cleaved in two, crashing down the chute. One piece smashed into the wall and stopped, but the other half, maybe 150 pounds and big as a carry-on suitcase, plowed toward Chris. He threw out his hands and stopped the rock with a grunt and a wince.

I scrambled down the chute, braced my feet on either side of the rock and held it in place as Chris climbed past me. I let go, and the chunk tumbled down the mountainside. A strong whiff of ozone from the fractured rocks hung in the air. He made a fist and released his fingers. Nothing broken.

My poorly placed step could have injured or killed him. But I imagine the two Alpini would have thought our near-miss trivial. On a later climbing mission with Vallepiana, Gaspard was struck by lightning and nearly died. This climb almost killed him, too. As he strained for a handhold at a tricky section, his foot slipped and he plummeted 60 feet—into a small snowbank, remarkable luck in vertical terrain. He climbed on, and into the Austrians’ view. A sniper shot him in the arm, and Austrian artillery across the valley fired shells into the mountain overhead, showering him and Vallepiana with jagged metal shards and shattered rock.

Still, the two reached the narrow ledge that overlooked the Austrians, a feat that earned them Italy’s second-highest medal for valor. Then, in what certainly seems an anticlimax today, the guns the Italians hauled up there proved less effective than they had hoped.

But the Italians’ main effort was even more daring and dif-ficult, as we would soon see.

In a region of magnificent peaks, the Castelletto is not much to behold. The squat trapezoid juts up 700 feet to a line of sharp spires, but is dwarfed by the Tofana di Rozes, which rises an addi-tional 1,100 feet just behind it. During our climb high on the Tofana wall we couldn’t see the Castelletto, but now it loomed before us.

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The remains of more than

5,000 unknown soldiers lie

in the Pasubio Ossuary.

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We sat in an old Italian trench built from limestone blocks in the Costeana Valley, which runs west from the mountain town of Cortina d’Ampezzo. If we strained our eyes, we could see tiny holes just below the Castelletto’s spine—windows for caverns the Austrians and Germans carved soon after Italy declared war in 1915.

From these tunnels and rooms, which offered excellent pro-tection from artillery fire, their machine gunners cut down any-one who showed himself in this valley. “You can imagine why this was such a nightmare for the Italians,” Joshua said, looking up at the fortress. In the struggle for the Castelletto we found in microcosm the savagery and intimacy, the ingenuity and futility of this alpine fighting.

The Italians first tried to climb it. On a summer night in 1915, four Alpini started up the steep face, difficult in daylight, surely terrifying at night. Lookouts perched on the rocky spires heard muffled sounds in the darkness below and stepped to the edge, eyes and ears straining. Again, sounds of movement, metal scraping against rock and labored breathing. A sentry leveled his rifle and, as the lead climber crested the face and pulled himself up, fired. The men were so close the muzzle flash lit the Italian’s face as he pitched backward. Thumps as he crashed into the climbers below him, then screams. In the morning the soldiers looked down on four crumpled bodies sprawled on the slope far below.

The Italians next tried the steep and rocky gully between the Castelletto and the Tofana, using a morning fog as cover. But the fog thinned enough to reveal specters advancing through the mist, and machine gunners annihilated them. In the au-tumn of 1915 they attacked from three sides with hundreds of men—surely they could overwhelm a platoon of defenders— but the slopes only piled deeper with dead.

The Alpini reconsidered: If they couldn’t storm the Castel-letto, maybe they could attack from within.

Just around the corner from the Castelletto and beyond the Austrians’ field of view, Joshua, Chris and I scaled 50 feet of metal rungs running beside the original wooden ladders, now broken and rotting. At an alcove on the Tofana wall, we found the tunnel opening, six feet wide and six feet high, and the dark-ness swallowed our headlamp beams. The path gains hundreds

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of feet as it climbs through the mountain, steep and treacherous on rock made slimy with water and mud. Fortunately for us, it’s now a via ferrata. We clipped our safety harnesses onto metal rods and cables fixed to the walls after the war.

The Alpini started with hammers and chisels in February of 1916 and pecked out just a few feet a day. In March they acquired two pneumatic drills driven by gas-powered compressors, hauled up the valley in pieces through the deep snow. Four teams of 25 to 30 men worked in continuous six-hour shifts, drilling, blasting and hauling rock, extending the tunnel by 15 to 30 feet each day. It would eventually stretch more than 1,500 feet.

The mountain shuddered with internal explosions, sometimes 60 or more a day, and as the ground shook beneath them the Austrians debated the Italians’ intent. Perhaps they would burst through the Tofana wall and attack across

A cross marks the Austrian

line in the Pasubio mountains,

a relic of their 1916

“Punishment Expedition.”

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the rocky saddle. Or emerge from below, another suggested. “One night, when we’re sleeping, they will jump out of their hole and cut our throats,” he said. The third theory, to which the men soon resigned themselves, was the most distressing: The Italians would fill the tunnel with explosives.

Indeed, deep in the mountain and halfway to the Castelletto, the tunnel split. One branch burrowed beneath the Austrian positions, where an enormous bomb would be placed. The other tunnel spi-raled higher, and would open on the Tofana face, at what the Ital-ians figured would be the bomb crater’s edge. After the blast, Alpini would pour through the tunnel and across the crater. Dozens would descend rope ladders from positions high on the Tofana wall, and scores more would charge up the steep gully. Within minutes of the blast, they would finally control the Castelletto.

The Austrian platoon commander, Hans Schneeberger, was 19 years old. He arrived on the Castelletto after an Ital-ian sniper killed his predecessor. “I would gladly have sent someone else,” Capt. Carl von Rasch told him, “but you are the youngest, and you have no family.” This was not a mission from which Schneeberger, or his men, were expected to return.

“It’s better that you know how things stand up here: They do not go well at all,” von Rasch said during a late-night visit to the outpost. “The Castelletto is in an impossible situation.” Nearly surrounded, under incessant artillery bombardment and sniper fire, with too few men and food running low. Throughout the val-ley, the Italians outnumbered the Austrians two to one; around the Castelletto it was perhaps 10 or 20 to one. “If you do not die from hunger or cold,” von Rasch said, “then someday soon you will be blown into the air.” Yet Schneeberger and his few men played a strategic role: By tying up hundreds of Italians, they could ease pressure elsewhere on the front.

“The Castelletto must be held. It will be held to the death,” von Rasch told him. “You must stay up here.”

In June, Schneeberger led a patrol onto the face of the Tof-ana di Rozes to knock out an Italian fighting position and, if possible, to sabotage the tunneling operation. After precarious climbing, he pulled himself onto a narrow lip, pitched an Al-pini over the edge and stormed into an outpost on the cliffside, where a trapdoor led to Italian positions below. His trusted

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sergeant, Teschner, nodded at the floor and smiled. He could hear Alpini climbing up rope ladders to attack.

A few days earlier, a half-dozen Austrians standing guard on the Tofana wall had started chatting with nearby Alpini, which led to a night of shared wine. Teschner did not share this affinity for the Alpini. One Sunday morning, when singing echoed off the rock walls from the Italians holding Mass below, he had rolled heavy spherical bombs down the gully between the Castelletto and the Tofana to interrupt the service.

Now in the small shack he drew his bayonet, threw open the trapdoor and shouted, “Welcome to heaven, dogs!” as he sliced through the rope ladders. The Alpini screamed, and Teschner laughed and slapped his thigh.

The attack earned Schneeberger Austria-Hungary’s highest medal for bravery, but he and his men learned nothing new about the tunneling, or how to stop it. Between daily skirmishes with Italian sentries, they pondered everything they would miss—a woman’s love, adventures in far-off lands, even lying bare-chested in the sun atop the Castelletto and daydreaming about a life after the war. Yet the explosions provided an odd comfort: As long as the Italians drilled and blasted, the mine wasn’t finished.

Then the Austrians intercepted a transmission: “The tunnel is ready. Everything is perfect.”

With the mountain silent and the blast imminent, Schnee-berger lay on his bunk and listened to mice skitter across the floor. “Strange, everyone knows that sooner or later he will have to die, and one hardly thinks about it,” he wrote. “But when death is certain, and one even knows the deadline, it eclipses every-thing: every thought and feeling.”

He gathered his men and asked if any wanted to leave. None stepped forward. Not Latschneider, the platoon’s oldest at 52, or Aschenbrenner, with eight children at home. And their wait began.

“Everything is like yesterday,” Schneeberger wrote on July 10, “except that another 24 hours have passed and we are 24 hours closer to death.”

Lt. Luigi Malvezzi, who led the tunnel digging, had asked for 77,000 pounds of blasting gelatin—nearly half of Italy’s monthly production. High command balked at the request, but was swayed by a frustrating detail: The Italians had pounded the Castelletto

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with artillery for nearly a year, to little effect. So for three days, Italian soldiers had ferried crates of explosives up the tunnel to the mine chamber, 16 feet wide, 16 feet long, and nearly 7 feet high. Through fissures in the rock, they could smell the Austrians’ cooking. They packed the chamber full, then backfilled 110 feet of the tunnel with sandbags, concrete and timber to direct the blast upward with full force.

At 3:30 a.m. on July 11, as Hans Schneeberger lay on his bunk mourning a friend who’d just been killed by a sniper’s bullet, Malvezzi gathered with his men on the terrace leading to the tun-nel and flipped the detonator switch. “One, two, three seconds passed in a silence so intense that I heard the sharp ping of the water dripping from the roof of the chamber and striking the pool

it had formed below,” Malvezzi wrote.Then the mountain roared, the air

filled with choking dust, and Schnee-berger’s head seemed ready to burst. The blast pitched him out of bed, and he stumbled from his room and into a fog of smoke and debris and stood at the lip of a massive crater that had been the southern end of the Castelletto. In the darkness and rubble, his men screamed.

The fight for this wedge of rock had gained such prominence for Italy that King Victor Emmanuel III and Gen. Luigi Cadorna, the army chief of staff, watched from a nearby mountain. A fountain of flame erupted in the dark-ness, the right-hand side of the Castel-letto shuddered and collapsed, and they cheered their success.

But the attack proved to be a fiasco. The explosion consumed much of the nearby oxygen, replacing it with carbon monox-ide and other toxic gases that swamped the crater and pushed into the tunnel. Malvezzi and his men charged through the tunnel to the crater and collapsed, unconscious. Several fell dead.

Evacuating the

wounded by cable car.

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Alpini waiting high on the Tofana wall couldn’t descend be-cause the explosion had shredded their rope ladders. And in the steep gully between the Castelletto and the Tofana, the blast fractured the rock face. For hours afterward huge boulders peeled off like flaking plaster and crashed down the gully, crush-ing attacking soldiers and sending the rest scurrying for cover.

We traced the Alpinis’ route through the tunnel, running our hands along walls slick with seeping water and scarred with grooves from the tunnelers’ drill bits. We passed the tunnel branch to the mine chamber and spiraled higher into the moun-tain, clipping our safety tethers to metal cables bolted to the walls.

Around a sharp bend, the darkness gave way. Along with the main detonation, the Italians triggered a small charge that blasted open the final few feet of this attack tunnel, until then kept se-cret from the Austrians. Now Joshua stepped from the tunnel, squinted in the daylight, and looked down on what had been the southern end of the Castelletto. He shook his head in awe.

“So this is what happens when you detonate 35 tons of explo-sives under a bunch of Austrians,” he said. Joshua had been near more explosions than he can remember—hand grenades, rock-ets, roadside bombs. In Iraq a suicide car bomber rammed into his outpost as he slept, and the blast threw him from his bed, just as it had Schneeberger. “But that was nowhere near the violence and landscape-altering force of this explosion,” he said.

We scrambled down a steep gravel slope and onto a wide snow-field at the crater’s bottom. The blast had pulverized enough mountain to fill a thousand dump trucks and tossed boulders across the valley. It killed 20 Austrians asleep in a shack above the mine and buried the machine guns and mortars.

It spared Schneeberger and a handful of his men. They scrounged a dozen rifles, 360 bullets and a few grenades, and from the crater’s edge and the intact outposts, started picking off Italians again.

“Imagine losing half your platoon instantly and having that will to push on and defend what you’ve got,” Joshua said. “Just a few men holding off an entire battalion trying to assault up through here. It’s madness.”

I felt a strange pulse of anticipation as we climbed out of the crater and onto the Castelletto. At last, the battle’s culmina-

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tion. Chris disappeared in the jumble of rock above us. A few minutes later he let out a happy yelp: He’d found an entrance to the Austrian positions.

We ducked our heads and stepped into a cavern that ran 100 feet through the Castelletto’s narrow spine. Water dripped from the ceiling and pooled in icy puddles. Small rooms branched off the main tunnel, some with old wooden bunks. Windows looked out on the valley far below and peaks in the distance.

Such beauty was hard to reconcile with what happened a cen-tury ago. Chris had pondered this often throughout the week. “You just stop and appreciate where you’re at for the moment,” he said. “And I wonder if they had those moments, too. Or if it was all terror, all the time.” Emotion choked his voice. “When we look across it’s green and verdant. But when they were there, it was barbed wire and trenches and artillery shells screaming around. Did they get to have a moment of peace?”

Joshua felt himself pulled deeply into the combatants’ world, and this startled him. “I have more in common with these Aus-trians and Italians who are buried under my feet than I do with a lot of contemporary society,” he said. “There’s this bond of being a soldier and going through combat,” he said. “The hardship. The fear. You’re just fighting for survival, or fighting for the people around you, and that transcends time.”

The Austrians’ and Italians’ losses and gains in these moun-tains made little difference. The alpine war was a sideshow to the fighting on the Isonzo, which was a sideshow to the Western and Eastern Fronts. But for the soldier, of course, all that matters is the patch of ground that must be taken or held, and whether he lives or dies in doing that.

The day after the blast, the Italians hoisted machine guns onto the Tofana and raked the Castelletto, killing more Austrians. The rest scurried into the tunnels where we now sat. Schnee-berger scribbled a note on his situation—33 dead, position nearly destroyed, reinforcements badly needed—and handed it to Latschneider.

“You only die once,” the platoon’s old man said, then crossed himself and sprinted down the wide scree slope between the Castelletto and the Tofana, chased by machine gun bullets. He ran across the valley, delivered the note to Captain von Rasch—and dropped dead from the effort.

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Reinforcements came that night, and Schneeberger marched his few surviving men back to the Austrian lines. The Italians charged through the crater a few hours later, lobbed tear gas into the tunnels and captured the southern end of the Castelletto and most of the relief platoon. A few Austrians held the northern end for several days, then withdrew.

In the Austrian camp, Schneeberger reported to von Rasch, who stood at his window with stooped shoulders and wet eyes, hands clasped behind his back.

“It was very hard?” he asked.“Sir,” Schneeberger said.“Poor, poor boy.”

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National Treasure

Power PlayerStokely Carmichael’s rallying cry marked a turning point in the movement

from the

smithsonian

national portrait

gallery

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Stokely Carmichael had already served 49 days inside a Mississippi prison farm for nonviolent civil rights activism when he returned to the state in June of 1966. Just 25 years old, a Howard University philosophy major who turned down a postgraduate scholarship at Harvard to become a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he was already a prominent voice in the movement. On the night of the 16th, Carmichael addressed a crowd of some 600 people gathered in a park in Greenwood to protest the shooting ten days before of the activist James Meredith, ambushed in Hernando while marching in support of voter registration. Meredith, who had earlier integrated the Uni-versity of Mississippi, survived, and the protesters were going to march for him.

“We have been saying ‘Freedom’ for six years,” Carmichael declared in a thundering voice. “What we are going to start say-ing now is ‘Black Power!’” The demand tore through the air like lightning. “We have begged the president,” Carmichael said. “We’ve begged the federal government. That’s all we’ve been doing, begging and begging. From now on, when they ask you what you want, you know what to tell them.”

It was a watershed moment: Carmichael, in his “Black Power” message, was breaking with Martin Luther King Jr.’s mantra of nonviolence. As Carmichael put it at the time, “We were never fighting for the right to integrate, we were fighting against white supremacy. We must dismiss the fallacious no-tion that white people can give anybody his freedom. A man is born free.”

Carmichael’s rallying call got the attention of the national press, including Time magazine, whose editors considered put-ting the riveting young leader on its cover. African-American personalities had rarely appeared on the cover of Time, and the few who did before 1966—Louis Armstrong, Joe Louis, Sugar Ray Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, among them—had crossed over into mainstream white society.

by Wil HaygoodPHOTOGRAPH BY Jason Pietra

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Time commissioned the best- known African-American artist in the nation, Jacob Lawrence, to produce the portrait. Lawrence traveled to Atlanta, where Carmichael sat for the artist. Lawrence later would recall his subject as “fiery, very active, and very much in command.” The finished portrait—today in the collections of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery—depicts Carmichael outfitted in denim overalls, the kind fieldworkers wore on Missis-sippi plantations. Over his left shoulder, a panther looms menac-ingly into view: This was justice stalking America.

The news magazine Time commissioned Jacob Lawrence to create this portrait of Stokely

Carmichael but never published it.

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The magazine, according to my review of its archival records, had planned to feature Carmichael on the cover of the issue dated July 15, 1966. But when that issue of Time hit the news-stands, the cover instead showed Indonesian leader Gen. Raden Suharto, who at the time was consolidating power and purging opponents. Why the switch? I found no documents to explain it.

The magazine’s own coverage hints at a change of direc-tion: An article in the July 1 issue, “The New Face of Racism,” criticized Carmichael himself. “Many militant ideologues are impatient with what they consider the glacial pace of progress in civil rights,” declared Time. “They espouse instead a racist philosophy that could ultimately perpetuate the very separat-ism against which Negroes have fought so successfully. Oddly, they are not white men but black and their slogan is ‘Black Power!’” The panther known as Stokely, it seems, had stalked himself right off the cover of Time.

University of Texas historian Peniel Joseph, author of Stokely: A Life, speculates that doubts may have developed at Time almost immediately after the portrait was assigned. “They did not want to be seen promoting a person on its cover who law enforcement was saying was promoting riots,” says Joseph. Another factor, he thinks, may have been national polls “showing that more people were approving of Martin Luther King Jr. than Stokely.”

In 1967, Carmichael departed SNCC and joined the more militant Black Panthers. By 1969, seeking a worldwide move-ment, he left the Panthers and moved to Guinea in West Africa. “Black power,” he asserted, “can only be realized when there exists a unified socialist Africa.”

Carmichael traveled from then on as an organizer and speaker for the pan-Africanism cause. He built ties with groups including the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Irish Republican Socialist Party. Carmichael, who changed his name to Kwame Ture, died of cancer in Guinea at age 57 in 1998.

Even in his final days, he was known to answer the phone with his signature salutation: “Ready for the revolution!”

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The chance discovery of a SECRET TUNNEL beneath a nearly 2,000-year-old pyramid in

Mexico leads to the heart of a lost civilization BY MATTHEW SHAER PHOTOGRAPHS BY JANET JARMAN

PASSAGE GODSto

the

The Temple of the

Plumed Serpent is adorned

with carved snake heads

and slithering bodies.

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In the fall of 2003, a heavy rainstorm swept through the ruins of Teoti-huacán, the pyramid-studded, pre-Aztec me-tropolis 30 miles northeast of present-day Mexico City. Dig sites sloshed over with wa-ter; a torrent of mud and debris coursed past rows of souvenir stands at the main entrance. The grounds of the city’s central courtyard buckled and broke. One morning, Sergio Gó-mez, an archaeologist with Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, arrived at work to find a nearly three-foot-wide sink-hole had opened at the foot of a large pyra-mid known as the Temple of the Plumed Ser-pent, in Teotihuacán’s southeast quadrant.

Gómez believes the

tunnel is “one of the most

important discoveries in the

history of Mexico.”

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“My first thought was, ‘What exactly am I looking at?’” Gó-mez told me recently. “The second was, ‘How exactly are we going to fix this?’”

Gómez is wiry and small, with pronounced cheekbones, nicotine-stained fingers and a helmet of dense black hair that adds a couple of inches to his height. He has spent the past three decades—almost all of his professional career—working in and around Teotihuacán, which once, long ago, served as a cosmopolitan center of the Mesoamerican world. He is fond of saying that there are few living humans who know the place as intimately as he does.

And as far as he was concerned, there wasn’t anything be-neath the Temple of the Plumed Serpent beyond dirt, fossils and rock. Gómez fetched a flashlight from his truck and aimed it into the sinkhole. Nothing: only darkness. So he tied a line of heavy rope around his waist and, with several colleagues hold-ing onto the other end, he descended into the murk.

Gómez came to rest in the middle of what appeared to be a man-made tunnel. “I could make out some of the ceiling,” he told me, “but the tunnel itself was blocked in both directions by these immense stones.”

In designing Teotihuacán (pronounced tay-oh-tee-wah-KAHN), the city’s architects had arranged the major monuments on a north-south axis, with the so-called “Avenue of the Dead” linking the largest structure, the Temple of the Sun, with the Ciudadela, the southeasterly courtyard that housed the Temple of the Plumed Serpent. Gómez knew that archaeologists had previously discovered a narrow tunnel underneath the Temple of the Sun. He theorized that he was now looking at a kind of mirror tunnel, leading to a subterranean chamber beneath the Temple of the Plumed Serpent. If he was correct, it would be a find of stunning proportions—the type of achievement that can make a career.

“The problem was,” he told me, “you can’t just dive in and start tearing up earth. You have to have a clear hypothesis, and you have to get approval.”

Gómez set about making his plans. He erected a tent over the sinkhole, to keep it away from the prying eyes of the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit Teotihuacán each year, and with the help of the National Institute of Anthropology and History

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arranged for the delivery of a lawnmower-size, high-resolution, ground-penetrating radar device. Beginning in the early months of 2004, he and a handpicked team of some 20 archaeologists and workers scanned the earth under the Ciudadela, returning every afternoon to upload the results to Gómez’s computers. By 2005, the digital map was complete.

“THIS CITY WASN’TDESIGNED TO ANSWER OUR

QUESTIONS.”

The view from atop the

Temple of the Moon.

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As Gómez had suspected, the tunnel ran approximately 330 feet from the Ciudadela to the center of the Temple of the Plumed Ser-pent. The hole that had appeared during the 2003 storms was not the actual entrance; that lay a few yards back, and it had apparently been intentionally sealed with large boulders nearly 2,000 years ago. Whatever was inside that tunnel, Gómez thought to himself, was meant to stay hidden forever.

Teotihuacán has long stood as the greatest of Mesoamerican mysteries: the site of a colossal and influential culture about which frustratingly little is understood, from the conditions of its rise to the circumstances of its collapse to its actual name. Teotihuacán translates as “the place where men become gods” in

Elaborately decorated

conch shells are found

throughout the city.

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Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, who likely found the ruins of the deserted city sometime in the 1300s, centuries after its aban-donment, and concluded that a powerful ur-culture—an ances-tor of theirs—must have once resided in its vast temples.

The city lies in a basin at the southernmost edge of the Mexi-can Plateau, an undulating landmass that forms the spine of modern-day Mexico. Inside the basin the climate is mild, the land riven by streams and rivers—ideal conditions for farming and raising livestock.

Teotihuacán itself was likely settled as early as 400 B.C., but it was only around A.D. 100, an era of robust population growth and increased urbanization in Mesoamerica, that the metropolis as we know it, with its wide boulevards and monumental pyramids,

The three-foot-long, remote-

controlled Tláloc II robot is

equipped with an infrared

scanner and video camera.

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EARLY URBANISMTeotihuacán’s ceremonial city center was built around the Avenue of the Dead, which runs for more than two miles. As many as 200,000 people lived in the surrounding areas, in some 2,000 structures not unlike apartment complexes.

Workers (below) examine earth from the Adosada Platform, a smaller structure abutting the Temple of the Plumed Serpent.

Nearly 100,000 tons of earth have been removed

from the tunnel, which Gómez hopes to finish

excavating this summer.

Covering 40 acres, the Ciudadela (“the Citadel”)

was able to hold tens of thousands of the city’s

residents during public ceremonies.

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was built. Some historians have theorized that its founders were refugees driven north by the eruption of a volcano. Others have speculated that they were Totonacs, a tribe from the east.

Whatever the case, the Teotihuacanos, as they are now known, proved themselves to be skilled urban planners. They built stone-sided canals to reroute the San Juan River directly under the Av-enue of the Dead, and set about constructing the pyramids that would form the city’s core: the Temple of the Plumed Serpent, the even larger 147-foot-tall Temple of the Moon and the bulky, sky-obscuring 213-foot-tall Temple of the Sun.

Clemency Coggins, a professor emerita of archaeology and art history at Boston University, has suggested that the city was de-signed as a physical manifestation of its founders’ creation myth. “Not only was Teotihuacán laid out in a measured rectangular grid, but the pattern was oriented to the movement of the sun, which was born there,” Coggins has written. She is far from the only historian to see the city as large-scale metaphor. Michael Coe, an archaeologist at Yale, argued in the 1980s that individual structures might be representations of the emergence of human-kind out of a vast and tumultuous sea. (As is in Genesis, Meso-americans of the time are thought to have envisioned the world as being born from complete darkness, in this case aqueous.) Con-sider the Temple of the Plumed Serpent, Coe suggested—the same temple that hid Sergio Gómez’s tunnel. The structure’s facade was splashed with what Coggins called “marine motifs”: shells and what appear to be waves. Coe wrote that the temple represents the “initial creation of the universe from a watery void.”

Recent evidence suggests that the religion practiced in these pyramids bore a resemblance to the religion practiced in the contemporaneous Mayan cities of Tikal and El Mirador, hun-dreds of miles to the southeast: the worshiping of the sun and moon and stars; the veneration of a Quetzalcoatl-like plumed serpent; the frequent occurrence, in painting and sculpture, of a jaguar that doubles as deity and protector of men.

Yet peaceful ritual was apparently not always enough to sustain the Teotihuacanos’ connection to their gods. In 2004, Saburo Sugiyama, an anthropologist from the University of Japan and Arizona State University, who has spent decades studying Teo-tihuacán, and Rubén Cabrera, of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History, located a vault under the Temple of the

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Moon that held the remains of an array of wild animals, including jungle cats and eagles, along with 12 human corpses, ten missing their heads. “It is hard to believe that the ritual consisted of clean symbolic performances,” Sugiyama said at the time. “It is most likely that the ceremony created a horrible scene of bloodshed with sacrificed people and animals.”

Between A.D. 150 and 300, Teotihuacán grew rapidly. Locals harvested beans, avocados, peppers and squash on fields raised in the middle of shallow lakes and swampland—a technique known as chinampa—and kept chickens and turkeys. Several heavily trafficked trade routes were established, linking Teoti-huacán to obsidian quarries in Pachuca and cacao groves near the Gulf of Mexico. Cotton came in from the Pacific Coast, ce-ramics from Veracruz.

By A.D. 400, Teotihuacán had become the most powerful and influential city in the region. Residential neighborhoods sprang up in concentric circles around the city center, eventually com-prising thousands of individual family dwellings, not dissimi-lar to single-story apartments, that together may have housed 200,000 people.

Recent fieldwork by scholars like David Carballo, of Boston University, has revealed the sheer diversity of the citizenry of Teotihuacán: Judging by artifacts and paintings found inside surviving structures, residents came to Teotihuacán from as far afield as Chiapas and the Yucatán. There were likely Ma-yan neighborhoods, and Zapotec ones. As the scholar Miguel Angel Torres, an official at Mexico’s National Institute for Anthropology and History, told me recently, Teotihuacán was probably one of the first major melting pots in the Western Hemisphere. “I believe that the city grew a little like modern Manhattan,” Torres says. “You walk around through these dif-ferent neighborhoods: Spanish Harlem, Chinatown, Korea-town. But together, the city functions as one, in harmony.”

The harmony did not last. There is a hint, in the demoli-tion of some of the sculptures that adorn the temples and monuments, of periodic regime change in the ruling class of Teotihuacán; and, in the depiction of shield- and spear-tot-ing warriors, of clashes with other local city-states. Perhaps, as several archaeologists suggested to me, civil war swept through Teotihuacán, culminating in a fire that seems to have

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damaged vast sections of the interior of the city around A.D. 550. Perhaps the fire was caused by a visiting army. Perhaps a large-scale migration occurred.

In A.D. 750, nearly 700 years after it was established, the city of Teotihuacán was abandoned, its monuments still filled with treasures and artifacts and bones, its buildings left to be eaten by the surrounding brush. The former residents of Teotihuacán, if

UP ABOVE, THERE WAS THE TEMPLE OF THE SUN AND THE ETERNAL DAY. DOWN BELOW, THE STARS, AND THE

DEEPEST NIGHT. A “flying dog” saucer

was found intact.

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they were not killed, were presumably absorbed into the popula-tions of neighboring cultures, or returned along the established trade routes to the lands where their ancestral kin still lived throughout the Mesoamerican world.

They took their secrets with them. Today, even after more than a century of excavation at the site, there is an extraordi-nary amount we do not know about the Teotihuacanos. They did have some kind of quasi-hieroglyphic written language, but we haven’t cracked it; we don’t know what tongue was spoken in-side the city, or even what the natives called the place. We have a conception of the religion they practiced, but we don’t know much about the priestly class, or the relative piety of the city’s citizenry, or the makeup of the courts or the military. We don’t know exactly what led to the city’s founding, or who ruled over it during its half-millennium of dominance, or what exactly caused its fall. As Matthew Robb, the curator of Mesoamerican art at San Francisco’s de Young Museum, told me, “This city

A conservator restores a

vase depicting a Tláloc-

like deity.

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wasn’t designed to answer our questions.” In archaeology and anthropology circles—to say nothing of

the popular press—Sergio Gómez’s discovery was greeted as a major turning point in Teotihuacán studies. The tunnel un-der the Temple of the Sun had been largely emptied by looters before archaeologists could get to it in the 1990s. But Gómez’s tunnel had been sealed off for some 1,800 years: Its treasures would be pristine.

In 2009, the government granted Gómez permission to dig, and he broke ground at the entrance of the tunnel, where he in-stalled a staircase and ladders that would allow easy access to the subterranean site. He moved at a painstaking pace: inches at a time, a few feet every month. Excavating was done manu-ally, with spades. Nearly 1,000 tons of earth were removed from the tunnel; after each new segment was cleared, Gómez brought in a 3-D scanner to document his progress.

The haul was tremendous. There were seashells, cat bones, pottery. There were fragments of human skin. There were elaborate necklaces. There were rings and wood and figurines. Everything was deposited deliberately and pointedly, as if in

Hot-air balloons float above

Teotihuacán just after dawn. In the

foreground is the Pyramid of the

Moon, with the Pyramid of the Sun

in the distance.

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offering. The picture was coming into focus for Gómez: This was not a place where ordinary residents could tread.

A university in Mexico City donated a pair of robots, Tlaloque and Tláloc II, playfully named for Aztec rain deities whose im-ages appear in early iterations throughout Teotihuacán, to in-spect deeper inside the tunnel, including the final stretch, which descended, on a ramp, an extra ten feet into the earth. Like me-chanical moles, the robots chewed through the soil, their camera lights aglow, and returned with hard drives full of spectacular footage: The tunnel seemed to end in a spacious cross-shaped chamber, piled high with more jewelry and several statues.

It was here, Gómez hoped, that he’d make his biggest find yet.

I met Gómez late last year, on a smoldering afternoon. He was smoking a cigarette and drinking coffee out of a foam cup. Tides of tourists swept to and fro over the grass of the Ciudadela—I heard scraps of Italian, Russian, French. An Asian couple stopped to peer in at Gómez and his team as if they were tigers at a zoo. Gómez looked back stonily, the cigarette hanging off his bottom lip.

Gómez told me about the work his team was doing to study the 75,000 or so artifacts they had already found, each of which needed to be carefully cataloged, analyzed and, when possible, restored. “I would estimate that we’re only about 10 percent through the process,” he said.

The restoration operation is set up in a cluster of buildings not far from the Ciudadela. In one room, a young man was sketching artifacts and noting where in the tunnel the objects had been found. Next door, a handful of conservators sat at a banquet-style table, bent over an array of pottery. The air smelled sharply of acetone and alcohol, a mixture used to remove contaminants from the artifacts.

“It might take you months just to finish a single large piece,” Vania García, a technician from Mexico City, told me. She was using a syringe primed with acetone to clean a particularly tiny crack. “But some of the other objects are remarkably well pre-served: They were buried carefully.” She recalled that not long ago, she found a powdery yellow substance at the bottom of a jar. It was corn, it turned out—1,800-year-old corn.

Passing through a lab where wood recovered from the tunnel

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was being carefully treated in chemical baths, we stepped into the storeroom. “This is where we keep the fully restored arti-facts,” Gómez said. There was a statue of a coiled jaguar, poised to pounce, and a collection of flawless obsidian knives. The ma-terial for the weapons had probably been brought in from the Pachuca region of Mexico and carved in Teotihuacán by master craftspeople. Gómez held out a knife for me to hold; it was mar-velously light. “What a society, no?” he exclaimed. “That could create something as beautiful and powerful as that.”

In the canvas tent erected over the entrance to the tunnel, Gómez’s team had installed a ladder that led down into the earth—a wobbly thing fastened to the top platform with frayed twine. I descended carefully, foot over foot, the brim of my hard hat slipping over my eyes. In the tunnel it was damp and cold, like a grave. To get anywhere, you had to walk on your haunches, turning to the side when the passage narrowed. As protection against cave-ins, Gómez’s workmen had installed several dozen feet of scaffolding—the earth here is unstable, and earthquakes are common. So far, there had been two par-tial collapses; no one had been hurt. Still, it was hard not to feel a shiver of taphophobia.

Through the middle of Teotihuacán studies runs a division like a fault line, separating those who believe that the city was ruled by an all-powerful and violent king and those who argue that it was governed by a council of elite families or otherwise bound groups, vying over time for relative influence, arising from the cosmopolitan nature of the city itself. The first camp, which in-cludes experts like Saburo Sugiyama, has precedent on its side—the Maya, for instance, are famous for their warlike kings—but unlike Mayan cities, where rulers had their visages festooned on buildings and where they were buried in opulent tombs, Teoti-huacán has offered up no such decorations, nor tombs.

Initially, much of the buzz surrounding the tunnel beneath the Temple of the Plumed Serpent centered on the possibility that Gómez and his colleagues might finally locate one such tomb, and thereby solve one of the city’s most fundamental enduring mysteries. Gómez himself has entertained the idea. But as we clambered through the tunnel, he laid out a hypoth-esis that seemed to stem more directly from the mythological readings of the city laid out by scholars like Clemency Coggins

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and Michael Coe. Fifty feet in, we stopped at a small inlet carved into the

wall. Not long before, Gómez and his colleagues had discov-ered traces of mercury in the tunnel, which Gómez believed served as symbolic representations of water, as well as the mineral pyrite, which was embedded in the rock by hand. In semi-darkness, Gómez explained, the shards of pyrite emit a throbbing, metallic glow. To demonstrate, he unscrewed the nearest light bulb. The pyrite came to life, like a distant galaxy. It was possible, in that moment, to imagine what the tunnel’s designers might have felt more than a thousand years ago: 40 feet underground, they’d replicated the experience of standing amid the stars.

If, Gómez suggested, it was true that the layout of the city proper was meant to stand in for the universe and its creation, might the tunnel, beneath the temple devoted to an all-encom-passing aqueous past, represent a world outside of time, an underworld or a world before, not the world of the living but of the dead? Up above, there was the Temple of the Sun and the eternal day. Down below, the stars—not of this earth—and the deepest night.

I followed Gómez down a short ramp and into the cross-shaped chamber directly under the heart of the Temple of the Plumed Serpent. Four archaeologists were kneeling in the dirt, brushes and thin-bladed trowels in hand. A nearby boombox blared Lady Gaga.

Gómez told me he had not been prepared for the sheer diver-sity of the objects he encountered in the farthermost reaches of the tunnel: necklaces, with the string intact. Boxes of beetle wings. Jaguar bones. Balls of amber. And perhaps most intrigu-ingly, a pair of finely carved black stone statues, each facing the wall opposite to the entryway of the chamber.

Writing in the late 1990s, Coggins speculated that religious tradition at Teotihuacán would have been “perpetuated in the linked repetition of ritual,” likely on the part of a priest-hood. That ritual, Coggins went on, “would have concerned the Creation, Teotihuacán’s role in it, and probably also the birth/emergence of the Teotihuacán people from a cave”—a deep and dark hole in the earth.

Gómez gestured at the area where the twin figures once

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stood. “You can imagine a scenario where priests come down here to pay tribute to them,” he explained—to the Creators of the universe, and of the city, one and the same.

Gómez has one more crucial task to undertake: the excavation of three distinct, buried sub-chambers located below the resting place of the figurines, the final sections of the tunnel complex as yet unexplored. Some scholars speculate that the elaborate ritual offerings on display here, and the presence of pyrite and mercury, which held known associations with the supernatural among ancient Mesoamericans, provide further evidence that the buried sub-chambers represent the entryway to a particular type of underworld: the place where the city’s ruler departed the world of the living. Others argue that even the discovery of long-sought human remains buried in spectacular fashion would hardly close the book on the mystery of Teotihuacán’s rul-ers: Whoever is buried here could be just one ruler among many, perhaps even some other kind of holy person.

For Gómez, the sub-chambers, whether they are filled with more ritual relics, or remains, or something entirely unex-pected, might be best understood as a symbolic “tomb”: a final resting place for the city’s founders, of gods and men.

A few months after leaving Mexico, I checked in with Gó-mez. He was only marginally closer to uncovering the cham-bers beneath the end of the tunnel. His archaeologists were literally often working with toothbrushes, so as not to damage whatever lay beneath.

Regardless of what he found at the end of the tunnel, once his excavation was complete, he promised me, he’d be satisfied. “The number of artifacts we’ve uncovered,” he said, pausing. “You could spend a whole career evaluating the contents.”

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WILDLIFE WARRIORS

FORMER COMMANDOS DEPLOY HARD-CORE GRIT AND HIGH-TECH GEAR TO BATTLE AFRICA’S OUT-OF-CONTROL

ANIMAL POACHERS

BY JOSHUA HAMMER PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETE MULLER

In the Democratic

Republic of Congo,

trainer Franck

Cunniet, far right,

trains rangers for a

confrontation with

poachers.

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he port of Ouesso, in the Republic of Congo, sprawls along the east bank of the Sangha River, a wide, murky stream that winds through the heart of Africa. One recent morning, a crowd gathered around a rotting dock in the harbor to gape at the sight of seven white men stepping gingerly into a 30-foot-long pirogue. Carved out of a tree trunk, and barely wide enough to accommodate a person with knees squeezed together, the pirogue rocked dangerously and seemed about to pitch its passengers into the oil-slicked water. Then it steadied itself, and we settled onto blue canvas folding chairs arranged single file from bow to stern. The shirt-less captain revved up the engine. The slender craft puttered past clumps of reeds, scuttled rowboats and an overturned barge, and joined the olive green river.

We were heading upstream to a vast preserve in the Central African Republic (CAR), and between here and there lay 132 miles of unbroken rainforest, home to el-ephants and western lowland gorillas, bongo antelopes, African forest buffaloes, gray-cheeked mangabeys and bush pigs, as well as soldiers, rebels, bandits and poach-ers. Leading our group was Nir Kalron, a 37-year-old for-mer Israeli commando who has built a thriving career selling his military expertise to conservation groups and game parks across Africa. Kalron’s sidekick, Remi Pog-nante, served in French military intelligence in Afghani-stan and Mali. They were joined by a three-man docu-mentary film team from the United States and Spain, the photographer Pete Muller and me.

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Kalron had been working to rescue several thousand for-est elephants in the Dzanga-Sangha Reserve, 1,544 square miles of rainforest in southwestern CAR. The smallest of three elephant species, with oval-shaped ears and straighter, downward-pointing tusks, these creatures inhabit the densely wooded rainforests of Liberia, Ivory Coast, the two Congos and the Central African Republic. But nowhere is their predica-ment worse than in CAR, site of one of the continent’s most notorious animal slaughters: the massacre three years ago of 26 forest elephants by Sudanese ivory hunters wielding semi-automatic rifles.

Shortly after the killings, Western conservationists based in the neighboring Republic of Congo asked Kalron and the se-curity firm that he founded, Maisha Consulting, to protect the remaining elephants. Through a unique combination of gritty freelance diplomacy, high-tech surveillance and intimations of powerful connections, Kalron helped quiet the violence. Today,

Nir Kalron travels at the front

of a pirogue on his way to the

Central African Republic.

“We’re here to shake things

up for poachers,” he says.

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according to the World Wildlife Fund, which administers the park alongside the CAR government, Dzanga-Sangha is one of the few places in Africa where “elephant poaching is now rare”—a little-known success on a continent plagued by illegal animal killing.

The killing in Zimbabwe of a protected lion named Cecil by a U.S. trophy hunter last July sparked justifiable outrage world-wide, but the far greater crime is that heavily armed gangs, working with sophisticated criminal networks, are wiping out elephants, rhinos and other animals to meet the soaring de-mand for ivory, horn and the like in China, Vietnam and else-where in the Far East. Between 2010 and 2012, ivory hunters shot down an astonishing 100,000 elephants across Africa—more than 60 percent of central Africa’s elephant population has been lost during the ten-year period beginning in 2002—according to the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. To coun-ter that unprecedented decline, governments and other wild-

Hundreds of elephants gather

each day at this “bai,” or

clearing, in Dzanga Bai National

Park, deep in the jungles of the

Central African Republic.

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life custodians have increasingly adopted a range of military tactics and farmed out work to private companies. Some of these outfits specialize in training park rangers. Others deploy state-of-the-art radar, supersensitive buried microphones, long-range cameras and drones to monitor protected areas. But even the experts agree that Maisha (Swahili for “life”) op-erates in a class of its own. It offers what Kalron calls “one-stop shopping,” selling intelligence, surveillance equipment, mili-tary training and even conflict resolution in Africa’s hardest-hit region.

“We’ve got people on our staff from every discipline—ana-lysts from the inner sanctum of Israeli intelligence, special op-erations guys, technical experts,” says Kalron. “We’ve got Arab speakers, Somali speakers, Hausa speakers. Each person is at the top of his field. They join us not only for the money, but be-cause they have an emotional stake in the work.” When it comes to poaching, he adds, “if you don’t say, ‘I want to get these guys,’ then you’re not for Maisha.”

I’ve covered poaching in Africa for more than two decades, from Kenya to Zimbabwe to Chad, observing how a brief period of hope in the 1990s and early 2000s gave way to the horrifying wanton slaughter of today. It strikes me that Kalron’s approach, which is not without controversy, is worth looking into. Can a privatized army apply the techniques of counterinsurgency to the conservation wars? Or do such militarized tactics invite only more disorder, while failing to address the economic and social roots of the poaching problem? So I grabbed the chance to join Kalron on a journey to the site of the forest elephant massacre to gauge the impact of his interventions there. As it happened, that’s where I ended up running through the forest to save my own life, confronted by an unappreciated dimension of the poaching epidemic, what I’ve come to think of as the re-venge of the wild: the hunted turned hunter.

Still in the Republic of Congo, we motored up the Sangha in our canoe, passing unbroken tropical forest, and stopping in the port of Bomassa near the border. We climbed the riverbank for a call at the headquarters of Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park, where Kalron and his fellow former commandos have been training Congolese rangers.

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When Kalron initially took on that job, he told me as we walked up the muddy steps, he was surprised that the rangers were not just inept from a lack of training but also physically weak. “These guys had manioc muscles,” said Kalron, referring to the starchy, low-protein Congolese dietary staple. But the rangers were ac-customed to hardship, and Kalron and Pognante got them to run miles each day and practice wresting poachers into custody. The Maisha team also, as discipline for being late, divided them into groups of eight to carry a half-ton log. If the rangers spoke out of turn, Kalron and Pognante sealed their mouths with duct tape and had them sing the Congolese national anthem. “We didn’t try to break them mentally, but that’s what happened,” Kalron said. Over six weeks, though, only one ranger dropped out. “These guys professionalized our anti-poaching teams,” says Mark Gately, the Wildlife Conservation Society country director for the Republic of Congo, who hired Kalron and Pognante. “I don’t know of anyone else who could have done the job they did.”

As we continued motoring upstream, Kalron pointed out a Cameroonian Army post on the west bank, where, he says, sol-diers fired AK-47s over his head in a (failed) shakedown attempt on one of his last trips. A few miles farther along, we reached the border. A tattered Central African Republic flag—bands of blue, white, red, green and yellow—fluttered over a shack. Scrawny chickens pecked at weeds; a rusting sign urged “Prevent AIDS by Abstinence.”

CAR, which freed itself of French rule in 1960, ranks at or near the bottom in every category of human development, weighed down by decades of exploitation, corruption, violence and pov-erty. The recent surge in animal poaching is linked to the po-litical chaos. In 2003, former army chief François Bozizé seized power with the support of Chad’s oil-rich president, Idriss Déby. But when the relationship ruptured, in 2012, Déby encouraged a coalition of mainly Muslim rebels—Muslims make up 15 per-cent of CAR’s population—to seize control of the country. The coalition, called the Séléka, hired Chadian and Sudanese mer-cenaries, and they captured the capital, Bangui, in March 2013. It was just two months later that, with the Séléka’s apparent complicity, 17 Sudanese ivory hunters invaded Dzanga-Sangha, climbed a game-viewing stand and gunned down 26 elephants, hacked out the tusks and left the corpses. Exactly what became

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of the ivory isn’t known, but the best guess is that the poachers trucked it to Bangui or across the border to Sudan, from which it was smuggled to the Far East. (Months later, the Séléka were driven out of Bangui by a mainly Christian paramilitary group, the “anti-balaka,” which massacred numerous Muslim civilians and drove nearly half a million people from the country. Now CAR is run by a newly elected government committed to sta-bilizing the country after an interim period overseen by 6,000 African Union peacekeepers and a few hundred French special forces. Some of those troops remain on the ground.)

When Kalron first arrived at the scene of the forest elephant massacre, the meadow was littered with skulls, bones and rot-ting pieces of flesh. Seeking advice and contacts on the ground, Kalron had phoned Andrea Turkalo, a Wildlife Conservation Society scientist who is also affiliated with Cornell Univer-sity and has studied elephants at Dzanga for more than two decades. She was in Massachusetts after fleeing the park for the first time in 26 years: “I got this call out of the blue. I said, ‘Who the hell is this?’ Nir said, ‘We’re going to go in and see

In 2015, poachers killed 24,000

African elephants. Above, a bull

crosses the grounds of a Wildlife

Conservation Society field office in

the Republic of Congo.

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what we can do.’ I said, ‘What?’ ”Turkalo urged Kalron to get in touch with a man named Cha-

mek, a Muslim who owned a small shop in Bayanga, the town nearest the park. He and a small group of traders had estab-lished good relations with the Séléka militia, persuading the rebels to respect the local population. With Chamek making the introductions, Kalron and his crew, including French and Arabic speakers, met the Séléka commander in front of his men. They proffered manioc and pineapples, and handed out boxes of anti-malaria tablets and first-aid kits. After several more trips, and more bestowing of gifts, including shoes, a Ko-ran and a pocketknife, they extracted a promise from the rebel commander and his men to protect animals in the park from further poaching.

Kalron and his team also recovered spent AK-47 cartridges at the elephant massacre site—and shed new light on the atroc-ity. The cartridges matched ones that they’d found at another elephant killing ground, Bouba Ndjida National Park in Cam-eroon, where poachers killed as many as 650 elephants in 2012. Cartridges from both sites were manufactured in Iran and used almost exclusively by paramilitary groups with backing from the Sudanese government. “The evidence gave a compelling portrait of a Sudanese poaching gang,” says Varun Vira of the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS) in Washington, D.C., which put out a report based on Kalron’s fieldwork and briefed the U.S. Congress and State Department on the crime.

I could be sitting one day having coffee in Africa with a Russian guy who then was selling weapons to Hezbollah. It didn’t feel right. The poachers were using heavy weapons. It was a real war. I realized, this is what I want to do.

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Tito Basile, the manager of Dzanga-Sangha, said that without Maisha’s intervention, the Séléka would have looted the park, killed guards and slaughtered more elephants. “It would have been very difficult to face these Séléka militiamen on our own,” he told me as we swatted mosquitoes on the porch outside his office in the gathering darkness.

Naftali Honig, director of a Brazzaville-based nongovernmen-tal organization that lobbies to tighten anti-corruption statutes, says Kalron’s crew was uniquely qualified to resolve the crisis nonviolently. “You needed someone present there who had a capacity to see eye to eye with the rebels who had taken over the country, and Maisha could do that,” he says. “The average con-servation group will not have conflict-resolution negotiators on its staff.”

Kalron and company “did something decisive,” says Turkalo, the U.S. researcher, “going in there unarmed, talking to people whom we thought were marauding lunatics. They are the real deal.”

Kalron grew up in Yavne, a coastal town south of Tel Aviv, the son of a navy pilot who served in the Yom Kippur War; his mater-nal grandfather was a secret agent in the Shai, the precursor to the Mossad. As a kid Kalron was adventurous and had a hanker-ing for trouble. “My mother didn’t like me hanging out with him,” said Omer Barak, a former Israeli Defense Forces intelligence officer and journalist who has known Kalron since kindergarten. As boys Barak and Kalron played in huge dunes on the outskirts of town; Kalron liked to leap off the summits and bury himself in the sand. “He always had the urge to head out to the most danger-ous places,” says Barak, who now works for Maisha Consulting.

Kalron joined the Israeli special forces in 1996 and was dis-patched to Lebanon, where he carried out covert operations against Hezbollah guerrillas. He finished his service in 2000. For several years he worked for an Israeli company that bro-kered sales of attack helicopters and other military hardware to African governments, but he soured on that. “I could be sitting having coffee in Africa with a Russian guy who then was selling weapons to Hezbollah,” he says. “It didn’t feel right.” So he got a job training Kenya Wildlife Service rangers at Tsavo National Park, which was struggling to hold off Somali bandits who were killing elephants. “The poachers were using heavy weapons. It

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was a real war,” he says. “I realized, this is what I want to do.” As the canoe motored up to the CAR border post on the Sangha

River, a handful of troops and officials in rags came alive at the sight of our unlikely group. We got out of the boat and for half an hour Kalron chatted up the soldiers and immigration officials in French. He returned with our stamped passports. “How does that Guns N’ Roses song go? ‘All we need is a little patience,’ ” he said with a grin.

Moments later we were motoring upriver again, on our way to the Dzanga-Sangha Reserve to see how the elephants were faring. Long after dark, the lights of a jungle camp glimmered on the eastern bank of the Sangha. After 14 hours on the river, we pulled up to a dock and carried our bags to an open-walled house at the base of a trail lined with seven thatched-roof bun-galows. This was the Sangha Lodge, owned by a South African ornithologist, Rod Cassidy, and his wife, Tamar. “The tourists are starting to trickle back,” Cassidy told us, as we shared a din-ner of lamb, homemade chutney and cold beer.

Kalron holds a ranger recruit’s

knees with his foot during

calisthenics in the village of Bili,

in DRC. Exercise is a key part of

the rangers’ training.

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The next morning, Kalron led us in a four-wheel-drive vehicle down a track through the jungle. Several times we got out and pushed the vehicle through muddy pools of water. After half an hour we reached the park headquarters: bungalows around a dirt courtyard, with paintings of the indigenous wildlife—leopards, hippos, crocodiles, pangolin (anteater-like mammals), bongos, forest buffaloes, wart hogs, mongooses—covering the scuffed walls. While Kalron discussed security with the park superin-tendent, I came upon an incongruous sight: a scrawny white man of late middle age, skin burnished to the color of a chestnut, using WiFi to check his email on an aging laptop and speaking with a New Jersey accent.

He was Louis Sarno, the musicologist, who first came here in the 1980s to study the music of the Bayaka Pygmy clan, which he describes in his book-and-CD package Bayaka: The Extraor-dinary Music of the Babenzele Pygmies. Sarno, a Newark native, stayed on to live among the natives, married a Pygmy woman and adopted two children. When the Séléka seized the area in early 2013, Sarno fled with the Pygmies into the forest, building shelters out of sticks and hunting antelopes and porcupines. “After three weeks the Séléka left; we thought it was clear, and then another group of Séléka came and I was told it was bet-ter to evacuate,” said Sarno, who was wearing a black fedora, khaki shorts and a tattered “Smoking Since 1879 Rolling Pa-pers” T-shirt. Sarno fled downriver to the Republic of Congo with Turkalo, the American researcher; he had hitched a ride back upriver with Kalron and crew.

I hiked with Kalron to the elephant massacre site—the Dzanga bai, a clearing the size of a dozen football fields, where hundreds of animals gather day and night to ingest nutrients from the muddy, mineral-rich soil. Trees thrust 80 feet into the metallic gray sky. Heavy rain had submerged the trail in waist-deep wa-ter, turning the ground into a soup of mud and elephant dung. Tété, our Pygmy guide, whom Kalron calls “the great honey chaser” because of his ability to climb impossibly tall trees and collect dripping combs to feed his family, led the way through the swamp. He kept an eye out for forest gorillas and poisonous snakes infesting the water.

When we arrived at the viewing stand, the clearing was teeming with life. I counted three dozen elephants—pre-

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adolescents, babies and one old bull that had covered himself com-pletely in mud. Lurking around the edges of the clearing were a dozen giant forest hogs and a small group of sitatunga, kudu-like antelopes with chocolate fur and spiral horns.

Kalron and Pognante checked the batteries on four concealed cameras that provide a panoramic view of the clearing. Kalron hoisted himself onto the roof to examine the direction of the satellite dish, which sends live feeds from the cameras to the reserve’s headquarters and to Maisha’s office in Tel Aviv. He also replaced the antenna and made sure the solar panels that charge the batteries were intact. The elephants kept coming. After an hour, the number had grown to 70; they were peacefully drink-ing, trunks embedded in the mineral-rich mud. “There were no elephants here for a week when we found the carcasses,” Kalron said, adding that the presence of many calves was a sign that the elephants had gained confidence since the slaughter.

Kalron and Pognante decided to remain in the viewing stand overnight to listen to the elephants. Just before dusk, I started back down the trail with Tété and the WWF’s Stephane Crayne, who had returned to Dzanga-Sangha park two months earlier to resume the conservation group’s operations there. As we rounded a corner and emerged from the jungle, just a few hun-dred feet from the park entrance, Tété froze. Ahead of us, loll-ing in a pool beside the gate, was a huge bull elephant.

Tété stared at the elephant, clapped his hands and let loose a stream of invectives in Bayaka. The elephant sprayed water, snorted, flared its ears and lumbered toward us. Tété turned and ran down the trail. A single thought passed through my mind: When your tracker bolts for his life, you’re in trouble.

We veered off the trail and cut through a muddy field. The slime yanked a sneaker off my foot. Tété plunged deeper into the for-est, dodging tree trunks, six-foot-high anthills and ankle-deep streams. I could hear a beast crashing through the forest yards away. Few things are more terrifying, I realized, than a rampag-ing elephant that you can hear but not see. We slogged for an hour through reed beds and waist-deep muck before finding refuge in a ranger station.

Kalron showed up at the lodge the next morning, and we told him what had happened. “That’s Jackie Two,” he said, adding that the bull had charged nearly everyone who has worked in-

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side the park. “He’s got a chip on his shoulder. You’re lucky he didn’t kill you.” Later I phoned Turkalo in Massachusetts, and she attributed Jackie Two’s bad temper to trauma: A poacher had shot his mother dead in front of him when he was an in-fant. My encounter with the bull suggested to me that this greed- fueled phase in the killing of Africa’s wild animals may have con-sequences that are even more profound than people have thought. The traumatized survivors of poaching sprees are perhaps acquir-ing a new sense of who humans are: They are learning, it seems, to regard us as the enemy—even to hate us.

Any private security force raises questions about account-ability: Maisha is no exception. In Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the private nonprofit orga-nization African Parks hired Kalron and his company to train rangers, but they ended up taking a more aggressive role. They chased a band of poachers through the bush for several days and wound up engaged in a gun battle with the gang near the border of South Sudan. “In general we are unarmed, but that time we got permission from the government to carry weap-ons,” Kalron admits. (Nobody was killed in the skirmish.) In this case, he says, the mission, conducted jointly with the army and rangers, was fully authorized by the military: “We are ex-tremely careful in how we do active operations.”

And since a security outfit’s revenue depends on responding to threats, it seldom has an interest in minimizing the danger.

Instead of focusing on solving problems, these [critics] are saying, ‘fight the demand.’ This kind of thing drives me crazy. What should I do, take over China? My specialty is trying to stop the bleeding.

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At a recent European Union strategy conference on protected-area management, held in Brussels, a few speakers and audi-ence members accused Maisha and others of hyping the risk posed by the Somali Islamist militant group al-Shabab and the Sudanese poaching gangs inside Africa’s game parks. Kalron responded by displaying photos of Séléka rebels carrying re-coilless rifles and machine guns in Dzanga-Sangha. Skeptics also argue that targeting the armed gangs in the anti-poaching struggle ignores the larger problems. The South African writer Adam Welz has argued that “the continental-scale slaughter of rhinos and elephants continues to intensify,” while other approaches to saving wildlife have been given short shrift, “in-cluding improving justice systems and launching efforts to reduce consumer demand for wildlife products.”

True enough, but I wonder if it isn’t asking too much that Kalron and company should not only meet armed bandits head-on but also eliminate high-level political malfeasance and counter deep economic forces. Kalron himself feels the criticism is misplaced. “Instead of focusing on solving prob-lems, these [critics] are saying, ‘fight the demand.’ This kind of thing drives me crazy,” Kalron told me. “What should I do, take over China? My specialty is trying to stop the bleeding. Using paramilitary and law enforcement stuff can be highly effective. But—and there’s a big but—if you don’t have the ability to work with local authorities, and confront corruption and tribal issues, then you’ll fail.”

Part of Maisha’s success is due to bringing new technologies into remote forests and parks where smugglers had long oper-ated out of sight. Kalron had shown me some of his latest gear in Tel Aviv, in a field near Ben Gurion Airport where half a dozen Maisha staff members met up. Beside four-wheel-drive vehicles and a table with a laptop computer, Kalron tested a DJI Phantom 2 pilotless quadricopter equipped with a 14-megapixel camera and WiFi for live video streaming. Kalron and I walked through the bushes to inspect a custom “snap trap” camouflaged in a thorn tree: It consists of an unattended camera with a motion detec-tor capable of distinguishing humans from animals, an acousti-cal receptor that can detect a rifle shot, and a spectrum analyzer that picks up the presence of a poacher’s radio or cellphone. The camera transmits real-time images via satellite and has enough

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battery power to stay concealed in the bush for a month or more.Then the demonstration began: A “poacher” wandered past the

snap trap, which captured his image and relayed it to the laptop. Alerted to the presence of an armed intruder, a staff member de-ployed the drone. It hovered 100 feet above the bush, transmitting high-definition images to the computer. The poacher fled, pursued by the quad. The Maisha team unleashed a Belgian shepherd dog; a small video camera attached to his collar transmitted data in real time. The dog leapt up, grabbed the padding on the poacher’s arm, and wrestled him to the ground. “We’ll place this [setup] in Dzanga-Sangha,” Kalron said. “It will be perfect there.”

Having spent a good deal of time with Kalron and seen him and his coworkers in action, and knowing well the ruthlessness of Africa’s new breed of high-powered poachers, I have come to share Turkalo’s view of Kalron’s approach: “We need more people with real military background [in the conservation field]. The big problem is that the wildlife organizations hate to be seen as militaristic. But people in the United States don’t understand the

Kalron (at Dzanga-Sangha) de-

mands total commitment from

his team. “If poaching doesn’t get

you angry,” he says, “you’re not

made for the mission.”

SMITHSONIAN.COM

nasty people you’re dealing with. You have to deal with them in a like manner.”

That approach would come to define Kalron and Maisha even more in the coming months. Since they trained Dzanga-Sangha’s 70 or so rangers, anti-poaching measures seem to be succeeding. Tourists have continued returning to the park, Jean-Bernard Ya-rissem, World Wildlife Fund national coordinator for the CAR, would tell me.

But Kalron and his team have moved on to other hot spots across Africa. Today they are working closely with wildlife authorities in Uganda, the birthplace of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, the messianic rebel cult, and also training anti-poaching dogs and rangers in northern Kenya, a frequent zone of conflict with So-malia’s al-Shabab terrorists. And Kalron has staff in Cameroon, near the Nigerian border, where the radical Islamist group Boko Haram is reportedly using profits from poaching to help fund its operations. “You name a hell hole with a rebel group, and we’re there,” Kalron says. The group’s application of counterterrorism methods to wildlife protection has also brought it full circle: Now

In the middle of the night,

ranger recruits in the Central

African Republic converge for

a training exercise on hand-to-

hand combat techniques.

SMITHSONIAN.COM

it’s providing advice on intelligence regarding terrorist threats to governments in “both Europe and North America,” Kalron says—without going into detail. “They value us because of our experience in the Middle East and Africa.”

After three days in Dzanga-Sangha, we climbed into another motorized pirogue for the long journey down the Sangha River to Ouesso, then by road to Brazzaville. The elephant rampage notwithstanding, there was a sense that things had gone well. The surveillance equipment in the Dzanga bai was in work-ing order; the World Wildlife Fund had re-established a pres-ence in the park; the forest elephants seemed out of danger, at least for the time being. Kalron had signed a contract to retrain Dzanga-Sangha’s rangers.

As we reached the outskirts of Brazzaville at 3 a.m., after a 22-hour journey, we pulled up to a roadblock manned by a po-lice force that has a reputation for being corrupt. “Where are your papers?” a surly sergeant demanded, and Kalron, stepping out of the car, showed him passports and documents from the Wildlife Conservation Society, his sponsor in the Republic of Congo. The sergeant insisted that the team’s Congolese visas had expired. The policeman demanded hundreds of dollars in “fines”; Kalron refused. The two men faced each other on the deserted street in the run-down, humid Congolese capital. Kal-ron stayed calm, arguing that the officer had read the expira-tion date wrong, quietly refusing to turn over any money. After about an hour, the sergeant gave up and allowed us to pass.

Kalron guided us through the empty streets to the Conser-vation Society guesthouse, past three burned-out Jeeps and a house blasted by grenades and bullets—the residue of a feud between President Denis Sassou Nguesso and a rogue military officer a few months earlier. “We had front-row seats at the battle,” said Kalron, and if I’m not mistaken, he was smiling.

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Mrs. Julie A. Flynn, Mr. William J. Galloway, Mrs. Shelby M. Gans,

Mr. Ronald Gidwitz, Mr. Rick Goings, Dr. Myra M. Hart, Mr. Edward R. Hintz,

Mrs. Nancy Hogan, Mrs. Emily Zug Huebner,* Ms. Judy S. Huret,

Ms. Jennifer Walston Johnson, Mr. Dennis J. Keller, Mr. Jonathan M. Kemper,

Mr. Paul G. Koontz, Mrs. Betsy Lawer, Ms. Cheryl Winter Lewy,

Mr. David M. Love, Mr. Kevin M. McGovern, Ms. Sarah E. Nash, Dr. Jorge G. Puente,

Mr. G. Jeffrey Records, Jr., Mrs. Kristin M. Richardson, Mr. John Cutler Ryan,

Ms. Deborah Sara Santana, Mrs. Marna Schnabel, Dr. Elisa Stephens,

Ms. Fredericka Stevenson, Mr. Michael E. Tennenbaum, Mr. John K. Tsui,

Mr. L. John Wilkerson, Ph.D., Ms. Deborah L. Wince-Smith

HONORARY MEMBERS Mr. Robert McC. Adams, Mr. William S. Anderson, Hon. Max N. Berry,

Mr. L. Hardwick Caldwell III, Mr. G. Wayne Clough, Mr. Frank A. Daniels, Jr.,

Mrs. Patricia Frost, Mr. James M. Kemper, Jr., Mrs. Jean B. Mahoney,

Mr. Paul Neely, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Mr. Wilbur L. Ross, Jr.,

Mr. Lloyd G. Schermer, Hon. Frank A. Weil, Mrs. Gay F. Wray

* Ex-Officio

SMITHSONIAN.COM

CreditsCOVER

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CONTRIBUTORS

PHENOMENA

ART OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

A WORLD WITHOUT

MOSQUITOES

BLOOD IN THE CLOUDS

POWER PLAYER

PASSAGE OF THE GODS

WILDLIFE WARRIORS

ASK SMITHSONIAN

Rafal Olechowski / Shutterstock

Janet Jarman; José Manuel V. Fragoso; George Bernard /

Science Source; Stefen Chow; Photo by Jason Pietra. ©2016

The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation,

Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Pete Muller /

Magnum Foundation / Prime

Illustrations by Justine Potin

American Icon: Library of Congress

Art: Heather Perry

Small Talk: Jen Siska

Adaptation: lllustration by Eric Palma

Essay: Dara Craul; Emma Cooper Key; Mary Reynolds (2)

Fast Forward: José Manuel V. Fragoso

André Grossman ©2015 Christo; Wolfgang Volz; Map: Guilbert

Gates; Christo and Jeanne Claude Studio

David Yoder; George Bernard / Science Source; Mike Kemp

/ Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Sources: Kevin M. Esvelt,

Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard

Medical School; Tony Nolan, Imperial College London

Stefen Chow; SZ Photo / Scherl / The Image Works; Maps:

Guilbert Gates; Imagno / Getty Images; NGS Image Collection /

The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY

Photo by Jason Pietra; ©2016 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight

Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS),

New York

Janet Jarman; Source: Sergio Gómez, René Million and David M.

Carballo

Pete Muller / Magnum Foundation / Prime Collective; Map:

Guilbert Gates

Illustration by Eric Diotte