Stone Cold

Some stories are so marvelous--in the purest sense of that word--that they produce a sense of almost childlike awe in the reader. An awe, that is, of a quality that a curious person tends to experience early on in his life, when he first reads about the dinosaurs or looks at pictures of cave paintings or brings his eye up close to the eye of a telescope, therein encountering worlds, infinite worlds, that are at once real and magical, factual and mysterious, fragmented and whole, worlds that can be learned, imagined, speculated about and dreamed over for hours at a time.

These stories are often so powerful that they transcend the form in which they are told. Such is the case with “Iceman,” Brenda Fowler’s rigorous account of the prehistoric man who was found in 1991 in a newly melted glacier high up in the Alps, in the Otztal mountains, at almost the exact spot where the Austrian Tyrol and the Italian South Tyrol are separated by an arbitrary (but because of the Iceman, suddenly sensitive) border. Fowler, who covered the unfolding story for The New York Times, has produced work here of unblemished thoroughness. She tells her story cleanly and with a good sense of order and pace, and she remains balanced in her assessment of the swirl of personalities that engulfed this remarkable visitor from the Stone Age. She is so careful in her scholarship and in her adherence to scientific principles of impartiality and factuality, though, that ultimately she drains the Iceman of some of his wonder. But just some.

Two remarkable accidents delivered the Iceman to the eyes and minds of the late 20th century. On Sept. 18, 1991, a confluence of timing, climate and human movement caused the glacier in which the Iceman was embedded to melt just enough for him to be exposed from the waist up, his head (it appeared) resting wearily on a rock, his torso naked, his possessions half-scattered, half-buried nearby. In this condition he was found by Helmut and Erika Simon, a pair of recreational hikers, who happened upon him by chance. And what chance! “In five thousand years,” as Fowler points out, “the corpse had been visible for just six or seven days. By astonishing coincidence, the Simons happened to pass by in precisely that blink of time. Just four days after their discovery, new snow fell again and concealed the site.”

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An earlier accident, equally great, also of timing, also of climate, also of human movement: 5,300 years ago, this unidentified Stone Age man died in the midst of a journey, perhaps because of a fall, and was so rapidly and efficiently preserved in the snow and the ice that when he was next seen more than five millenniums later, he was still recognizably and profoundly human; his body, though desiccated, still contained dozens of secrets in its organs and its tissues; his possessions, though damaged, could still be reassembled, identified, tested, speculated over; his clothing, however tattered, could be assessed, sketched and reconstructed. The Iceman was a time capsule, delivered to us as though by magic, yet capable of being opened, analyzed and understood by science, ratiocination and some clever conjecture.

“Iceman” is an unexpectedly suspenseful book. From the very beginning the reader knows what the key players--the hikers, the police, the medical examiners, the scientists and the archeologists--cannot: This curious corpse isn’t, as they first think, 50 or a hundred years old or even a thousand but much older, much rarer, much more stunning in every detail. And Fowler lays in these details, red herrings included, with the relish and the rhythm of a good detective writer.

Each detail, really, is more remarkable than the last. There is the position of the Iceman’s body, for instance: draped over a boulder, his left arm reaching toward the right, the right shooting down into the ice. Is this how he died? Had he been buried? Had the glacier moved him into so uncomfortable a position? Had vandals? And the body itself: the intact eyeballs; the tattoos on his back (a form of acupuncture for relief from osteoarthritis in his hips emerges as the best guess as to their purpose); the broken ribs; the apparently missing genitalia (they were later discovered to have shriveled up); the extraordinarily important contents of his stomach, in which a scientist eventually identified traces of pollen from a hop hornbeam, thus helping to establish his last movements and the time of year during which he died, both something of a surprise.

Then there were the Iceman’s possessions: his striking ax, whose hefted copper blade located him in a period when people in the region began to work with metal; his quiver, its rod broken and showing signs of an emergency repair, together with 14 arrow shafts, also all broken; his arrowheads; his unfinished bow; a clump of maple leaves he had been carrying, more than a dozen in all, each still containing traces of chlorophyll (another clue to the time of year in which he died) and altogether wrapping up bits of charcoal, hence embers, hence the all-important transportable fire.

The Iceman had been well-protected against the cold. Out of soggy scraps of leather and fur an expert was able to recreate his dress: a loincloth, a kind of garter belt that held up leggings, a fanny pack, shoes stuffed with grass for insulation, a tunic of alternating light and dark furs (thus, irrefutably, fashion!), a grass cape, a fur hat. No archeologist or anthropologist had ever before imagined leggings, a fanny pack or a discernment of haberdashery for men of the Iceman’s era.

Very little of this information emerges cleanly, simply or quickly. Indeed many of the sadder passages in Fowler’s book address human fallibility, greed and competitiveness. When the Iceman was extracted from his frozen cocoon, no archeologists were present. Few photographs were taken. A jackhammer was used and damaged his precious body and fragile belongings. Later his remains were fought over; scientific samples were doled out. His story was sold and resold, arrogated by governments, disputed by geneticists, pounced on by the media.

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Yet through all this modern cacophony, the Iceman’s ancient silence and magical mystery remain intact. He is a puzzle to be solved but never wholly. He is an object of study but he is also, he was also once, a human being. Normally a non-judging narrator, Fowler is uncharacteristically hard on Konrad Spindler, an archeologist who early on quickly “granted the corpse a personality” and later tried to profit from the Iceman by writing a book and hitting the lecture circuit with a dramatic (if not wholly substantiated) account of his final hours, thereby violating the impartiality and the lack of speculative interpretation that are fundamental to pure science. Elsewhere she writes about the way scientists (and, the reader wonders by implication, journalists as well?) are trained to “suppress” any “yearnings” to make a human connection to their subject. Toward the end of book, Fowler rather wearily returns to this, one of its more interesting (and underexplored) themes: “From the time of the discovery the scientists, with very few exceptions, saw not a research project but a person with a story,” she observes with apparent impatience. “Ultimately, the disparate body of scientific facts gleaned from the site did not add up to a real person. That they never could was something that no scientist ever admitted.”

And why would he? The quest for the person the Iceman was is an impulse that Fowler’s book, an accomplished work of journalism though it is, fails to sympathize with sufficiently. For this the Iceman wants a poet or a novelist, a more unusual imagination, in any event, to take up the unusual circumstances of his presence among us.

Any takers?