Spartacus by Howard Fast

this knowledge has been shared through all the ages by those who taste the hell men make on earth. Now it is frightful to walk, to breathe, to see, to think.

    But this does not go on forever. Suddenly, it is delineated, and the further aspect of hell appears. Black ridges show ahead of you, strange, nightmarish black ridges. This is the black stone escarpment. You go on toward the black stone, and then you see that it is streaked through and through with veins of shining white marble. Oh, how bright this marble is! Oh, how it gleams and shines and with what heavenly lustre! But it must have a heavenly lustre, for the streets of heaven are paved with gold, and the white marble is rich with gold. That is why men came to this place, and that is why you are coming here, because the marble is rich and heavy with gold.

    Go closer and see. It was long ago that the Egyptian Pharaohs discovered this black rock escarpment, and in those days they had only tools of copper and bronze. So they could chip and scratch at the surface, but little more. But after generations of scratching at the surface, the gold gave out and it was necessary to go into the black rock and cut away the white marble. This was made possible because the age of copper was past and the age of iron had come, and now men could work the marble with picks and iron wedges and eighteen-pound sledges.

    But a new kind of man was needed. The heat and the dust and the physical contortions necessary to follow the twisting gold-bearing veins into the rock made it impossible to employ peasants either from Ethiopia or from Egypt, and the ordinary slave cost too much and died too quickly. So to this place were brought war-hardened soldiers taken captive and children who were koruu, bred from slaves who were bred from slaves in a process where only the toughest and the hardest could survive. And children were needed, for when the veins narrowed, deep inside the black rock escarpment, only a child could work there.

    The old splendor and power of the Pharaohs passed away and the purses of the Greek kings of Egypt dwindled; the hand of Rome lay over them and the slave dealers of Rome took over the operation of the mines. In any case, no one but Romans knew how to work slaves properly.

    So you come to the mines as Spartacus did, one hundred and twenty-two Thracians chained neck to neck, carrying their burning hot chains across the desert all the way from the First Cataract. The twelfth man from the front of the line is Spartacus. He is almost naked, as they all are almost naked, and soon he will be entirely naked. He wears a shred of a loin cloth, and his hair is long and he is bearded, just as every man in the line is long-haired and bearded. His sandals have worn through, but he wears the little that is left of them for what protection it may offer; for though the skin of his feet is a quarter of an inch thick and as tough as leather, it is not enough protection against the burning desert sands.

    What is he like, this man Spartacus? He is twenty-three years old as he carries his chain across the desert, but it is not marked on him; for his kind, there is an agelessness of toil, no youth and no manhood and no growing old, but only the agelessness of toil. From head to foot and hair and beard and face, he is covered with the powdery white sand, but underneath the sand his skin is burned brown as his dark, intense eyes, which peer out of his cadaverous face like hateful coals. The brown skin is an adjunct of life for such as he; the white-skinned, yellow-haired slaves of the Northlands cannot work in the mines; the sun fries them and kills them, and they pass away in bitter pain.

    Tall or short is hard to say, for men in chains do not walk erect, but the body is whipcord, sun-jerked meat, dry and waterless but not fleshless. For so many generations there was a process of gleaning out, winnowing out, and on the stony hills of Thrace the living was never easy, so that what survived