I've never really had a head for heights. It was obvious to me from an early age. Even from primary school days, the instruction to relay race across the school gym, ascend and descend the wall-bars on the far wall, pausing only to touch the highest point on the wall you could manage, always had my palms sweating. Then we would get the chance to do it again and again. Bliss. Later witticisms such as "it's not the falling, it's the landing that hurts," summed it up very neatly.
The Romans seemed to have a penchant for sending, wrong-doers, and those in the wrong place at the wrong time, on one way vertical journeys. The first time I visited Rome I sought out the famous Rupe Tarpeia - the Tarpean Rock. It took a while to find it, primarily because it's now clad in concrete to prevent it crumbling. And the ground level has risen substantially over the centuries so the fearful drop is still deadly but not quite so monumental as it once was. I confess I was moderately disappointed. By the concrete cladding I mean.
Another holiday took me to Capri and if you've ever been you will recall the ferries take you past the monstrously high, sheer cliffs, atop which the emperor Tiberius had his villa of debauchery. He had decamped from his duties in Rome to spend years on a comparatively tiny rock in the Bay of Naples, safely isolated from the (relative) morality of Rome. Those who offended him apparently got the scenic way down, head first for hundreds of feet into the sea.
It got me wondering if my fear of falling was simply a genetic memory of some ancestor who said the wrong thing, or made a really bad suggestion. I wonder if the centurion pushing them off murmured a last piece of sympathetic advice, "it's not the falling, it's the landing that hurts."
More than fifty years later my hands still sweat at the thought of those wall bars. I was always happy to be last but at least it never hurt.
Add comment
Comments