Free The Fracture Zone by Simon Winchester

directions that were the varied sums of the trending directions of all their parent ranges, and were extraordinarily complex as a result.
    The ranges of hills had unexpectedly steep faces and deepand curiously isolated valleys, rivers that twisted and turned in corkscrew patterns, defiles that became dangerous culs-de-sac, hidden and unexpected plains, eternally defensible hilltops and impossibly deep canyons, eccentricities of microclimates, and on the coastline (which was of amazing length, and adorned with bizarrely shaped islands, skerries, and reefs) deep fjordlike harbors and wriggling estuaries that proved terrifyingly nightmarish to innocent navigators.
    Add to all this the fact that the rock out of which the Balkans are made was not something grand and imperturbable, like granite, dolerite, or marble, but rather the soft young limestone, made in Permian times in the warm Tethyan Sea, that dissolves so readily in the mild hydrochloric acid that is rainwater that even in areas of classic and stable geology like North Yorkshire, it forms areas of fantastic topography—these are the so-called karsts, with their deep caves and gorges and vanishing rivers. A fantastically troubled underneath and a waywardly malleable and porous upper surface: How much weirder a landscape is it possible to imagine?
    And that is even before the human population had been grafted onto it all.
    One might say that anyone who inhabited such a place for a long period would probably eventually evolve into something that varied substantially, for good or for ill, from whatever is the human norm. I imagine it can be argued that geologically and tectonically stable (and so generally rather tediously flat) regions—like Holland, Kansas, North China, the Australian Outback—tend to be inhabited by the less fractious of the world’s peoples—peoples who depart from the norm in being perhaps less aggressive, less bellicose, perhaps less curious, less imaginative. Places that have a more crazed geology, on the other hand, quite possibly tend to attract, or maybe even to produce, peoples who are of a (let us say) more robust character.
    Given that the Slavs who moved into the Balkans two thousandyears ago were already of fairly robust stock—they were probably Iranian-led and came from the shores of the Black Sea, the wilds of the Caucasus and northern Persia’s Elburz Mountains—it is scarcely surprising to find that, once they had vanished into their isolated Balkan valleys and hidden harbors and climatically unrelated culs-de-sac, they became—one from another and all from those outside—a very different people indeed.
     
    Such were my musings on the train. I almost missed the border inspections, of which there were quite a number. We were stamped out of Austria by an efficient and smiling pair of guards, and then into Slovenia, at a place called Maribor, by a posse of gray-suited and rather miserable Slovenes.
    These, then, were the first true Slavs we had encountered and if one wanted a reminder that the word Slav is a portmanteau term that encompasses as multiethnic and polyglot a group as it is possible to imagine, then this forlorn group of Slovenian frontier guards more than amply fitted the bill. One of them, the passport stamper, was very round and fat, with a shaved head, and he looked like an only very slightly animated potato. One had such sharp features that he reminded me of a weasel. Another was short, dark, and sallow. A fourth was burly and had a beard. The sole woman among them had flaming red hair. There was no apparent ethnic unity to them at all—and all that distinguished them from the people from among whom we had come is that while those behind us had been all Germanic and did all have the same very general kind of appearance, these here in the Maribor railway station were in no way Germanic and all looked quite different. Two of them, though, had crucifixes around their necks, and not one them wrote in (nor were their