The Whispers Of Rock by Anjana Khatwa

4 out of 5 stars

The publisher provided a copy of this, free of charge, in return for an honest review.

Unless you are a geologist or a quarryman, most people don’t think about rocks at all during their day. I know I am one of those people. I may take more notice when out and about, but then we’re spoilt here on the Jurassic coast. Rocks are the very foundation of our planet, our homes and our cities. They have been venerated by our ancestors for millennia too, hence why Anjana starts this book at some of the most famous rocks in the world, Stonehenge.

Why these stones were erected in this way and for what purpose, we will never really know, though modern archaeology and theories have gained a little insight into the Stone Age mind. We do know the use of some of the stone artefacts left behind, though. These tools were made by Mesolithic humans and are instantly recognisable as the shape and functions are still valid today. There is a photo of a beautiful banded gneiss mace head found in the Thames in the book. The rock it was made from is 2.7 billion years old.

That is quite an age for a rock; however, the oldest rock on Earth discovered so far is 4.4 billion years old. This fact staggered me, as this must have been one of the first rocks to solidify from lava. The zircon in the rock acts as a record of how old they are and allows scientists to look back in time. The ancient gneiss of Canada is found in more than its geological records. The rock can be found in the creation stories and rituals of the First Nation people there.
Continental drift was originally proposed as a theory in the early 20th century, but it was first proven in 1957 and is now known as plate tectonics. The speed of movement is mm per year for the fastest plates and almost no movement for others. Except for some that then, when they do move, go so quickly that it causes earthquakes and tsunamis and are a reminder that for all man’s mastery over the planet, we’re only here for a short time, and our existence is very short compared to the rocks beneath our feet.

Indigenous people coped with this natural onslaught by performing rituals to Mother Earth. Seeing the planet as a female is very common in these cultures; Gaia, Bhumi Deu and Pachamama are just three examples. Their creation stories go some way to explaining the seismic activity in these areas that the local population could understand. The ancient reverence that the New Zealand people have for a rock called Pounamu is carried forward to the rugby team, who have a Māori stone that all players touch before a game. A similar reverence for Mother Earth, but with very different rituals, can be found in her own faith, Hinduism. Mother Bhumi is the earth goddess who must be treated with due respect and not be injured by people’s labour.
Rock has a timeless quality about it; probably because geological time is on a completely different scale to human time. Our three score and ten is a mere blink of an eye compared to 55 million years or longer.

Walking into a tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt is walking deep into the past. Not just the historical elements, the hieroglyphs and the way that the tomb was carved from the rock, but the limestone rock itself has its own story to tell. Rocks can bring trouble to people, too, not just from falling on people. There is arsenic present in the Himalayas, and the silt that washes down to Bangladesh causes all manner of health problems. The discovery of gold in the West of America caused the obliteration of a number of First Nation tribes in the region because of greed.
The rock that started Khatwa on her geological journey came from a volcano in the Tsavo National Park over three decades ago. She picked up this vesicular basalt whilst on a family holiday and from that moment on was hooked on rocks and has made a career from it. These deadly natural phenomena are some of the most dramatic natural processes of geology we can see in certain places around the world. The closest I have knowingly been to a volcano was when on holiday in Sicily. We didn’t get to go and see Etna, whilst there, maybe another day. If you want to have red hot rocks thrown at you, then the place to go is Iceland; genuinely the land of ice and fire.

Being classed as a space invader is not a reference to a slightly rubbish game of the 1980s, but a phrase that she is told about as she walks through the Chilterns. It is a phrase that hang heavily with her as she goes on to write about the way that colonial invaders have taken over land and resources in Brazil and other parts of South America and the efforts that the indigenous people are taking to push back and reclaim what is rightfully theirs.

Sedimentary rocks are formed from organic matter or minerals that have collected in a depression. As layers form above them, they are crushed and become rock. This process takes millions of years, but the formations that it creates are magnificent. Khatwa is in Petra looking at the rocks there, they are multicoloured, with strips of yellow, pink, white and orange, and are a thing of beauty. Leaving Petra through the narrow gorge of Siq is an experience that she has never had before; the way that the light flows around the rock is exquisite.
The Arches National Park in America is home to a number of First Nation Tribes who consider the landscapes as portals. The photos in the book only hint at how stunning they are. The reverence that they hold for the arches shows a deep spiritual dimension for the place and the rocks from which they are created from. Sadly, this often clashes with the Western view that can only see these as a source of income and possible scientific gain.

She is searching for fossils on the beautiful beaches of West Dorset. They get lucky and find an ammonite and the vertebra of an ichthyosaur. Both have been in and become part of the rocks for millions of years. Even though I have looked on the same beaches a few times, I still haven’t found either yet!
Rocks have been a constant in her life, as well as giving her qualifications and a career; they helped her get through a traumatic breakup when she was a young mother.
Rocks also undergo traumatic changes during their incredibly long life spans as they are absorbed into the crust and subjected to massive temperatures and pressures. These forces change their structure and composition to become something better and stronger after. We can have a similar recovery from life events, becoming more resilient after them.

Mountains are large and immovable objects, and people tend to see them as indestructible. They are, but also they aren’t. Something as simple as water can break them; constant freezing and thawing over countless years cracks the mountain into boulders, stone and sand, and couple that with erosion, then they do not stand a chance with geological time. Sometimes the roots of these once great mountains are the only things left. New York is an example, and the grey slate quarries in the Welsh hills are two that she explores in the book.
Erratics are those boulders that are found on the surface but are utterly different to the underlying bedrock. Nobody really knew how they had got there, so all sorts of folkloric stories were invented to explain how they arrived there. Most of them had some variation of the devil throwing them, but there are other local variations. The real explanation is much simpler: glaciers carried these enormous stones to their new resting places, but it took quite a while for science to work it out.
I must admit I don’t think about rocks a huge amount. I like looking at them when we are out and about, particularly the rocks along the beautiful Jurassic Coast in my home county. I am always a little concerned about how long the cliffs are going to last at West Bay, though.

What Khatwa does in this book is to blend the hard science of geology with the softer, more human story and how indigenous people have seen the rocks in their landscapes as an almost living entity. The rocks have whispered their own stories to the people that lived around them, and they, in turn, have made them central to their culture.

One generation of rock equals many, many generations of humans, but in a kind of strange way, the collective memory of humans overlaps the rock era. What I liked most about this book is that it opened my eyes to a new way of looking and thinking about the way humans have and need to co-exist with the landscapes around them in this only planet we have. I thought this was well worth reading.