Tony Grey

This book offers a profound exploration of various facets of human nature, drawing parallels with historical events, life experiences, and artistic expressions. With 27 chapters covering a wide array of concepts such as happiness, laughter, hope, exploration, science, authority, and more, Grey’s work mirrors the comprehensive approach seen in “Complete Essays” by Michel de Montaigne. Grey masterfully weaves together insights into human behaviour, reflecting on themes like trust, initiative, exploration, hope, competition, cooperation, power, gratitude, connection, the relevance of Shakespeare, and the pursuit of happiness. Through poignant examples and personal anecdotes, Grey elucidates the complexities and nuances inherent in the human experience.

(published in The Australian Feb19/21)

Australia’s ability to reach net-zero carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 will be determined, according to Scott Morrison, by advances in science and technology. It is impossible not to agree with his assessment.

While there is no utopian solution to our energy challenge, all sources of low-emissions energy, be it wind, solar, hydro or nuclear have their strengths and weaknesses.

Rather than treating these energy sources as being part of some sort of competition, an obvious pathway to zero emissions is to do as suggested by Canadian Natural Resources Deputy Minister Jean-Francois Tremblay to seek ways to get them to work together to achieve climate neutrality.

Canada, like most advanced economies, has a mix of energy sources, with hydro the biggest contributor (60 per cent) followed by nuclear (15 per cent), coal (7 per cent), gas/oil/others (11 per cent) and non-hydro renewables (7 per cent).

We can look at nuclear as a baseload on which we can build our alternate strategy, Tremblay said. I think that’s a fundamental shift that is now allowing us to be pragmatic.

The shift is aided by the advances being made to small modular reactors designed for serial construction, a game changer that could benefit Australia.

But, astonishing though it is, Australia has legislation passed in the 1990s prohibiting nuclear power, while the country is the third biggest uranium exporter, selling uranium oxide to a dozen or more countries, mostly the US, the EU, Japan and China.

If we are to confront the challenge of climate change, the overriding objective should be to develop emission-free energy sources.

With its reliable baseload, emission-free nuclear is a natural to form a symbiotic alliance with less reliable renewables such as wind and solar. All are carbon-free sources and the pathway to climate change amelioration.

Indeed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states unequivocally that without the contribution of nuclear power it would not be possible to keep future temperature rises below its 1.5C target.

And there is another alliance for nuclear waiting in the wings. Hydrogen named after the Greek for water maker, indicating its benign nature is in the early phase of development on the energy stage as a star performer.

The World Nuclear Association estimates that the energy demand for hydrogen production could exceed today’s electricity generation, and it has some potential to replace oil as a transport fuel.

While in much of the world transport is expected to be the largest hydrogen user, heating for buildings will run second, potentially replacing natural gas.

Like electricity, hydrogen is not a primary energy source but an energy carrier. As it does not occur in free form it must be separated from molecules such a water (H2O) or methane gas (CH4). The obvious source of hydrogen is the most plentiful compound on the planet water- thus allowing for zero-carbon hydrogen via electrolysis. Not surprisingly, energy is needed for this. Any source will do but it would seem sensible to employ a carbon-free type.

Hydro is one of these and Tasmania is looking to develop its advanced manufacturing zone in the state’s north using hydro. Elsewhere in Australia, where hydro contributes only about 6 per cent of energy to the national grid, the only other clean source with the advantage of consistency and flexibility is nuclear.

Wind and solar suffer from debilitating intermittency when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. A steady energy source is required to fill the downtime. In Australia it is usually coal or natural gas-fired plants.

The IPCC points out that nuclear power is a non-intermittent energy source (other than hydro) that emits the least CO2. It can come to the rescue of renewables. An advantage is its ability to adjust its power output as demand for electricity fluctuates throughout the day and night, a feature known as load-following.

In the near future, small modular reactors could provide the base power needed to keep the hydrogen production steady. Defined as less than 300 megawatts, and capable of being as small as 5MW (called microreactors), these devices aretransportable on trucks to where the need requires.

Australia is showing increasing interest in the potential of hydrogen. The National Hydrogen Roadmap produced by the CSIRO mentions the exciting opportunity of developing a new export capability based on liquid hydrogen, which it says could be a potential game changer for the local industry.

In the future, as the transition in the energy system gains pace and fossil fuels reduce their contribution to Australian exports, liquid hydrogen could enter the gap.

If we take seriously the need to achieve net-zero carbon emissions, it makes sense to invite emission-free nuclear into an alliance with renewables to inject some certainty into the exercise. In fact, it is hard to see Australia achieving the Prime Minister’s goal without it. What are we waiting for?

————————————————————————————————————————–Tony Grey was the founder and chief executive of Pancontinental Mining Ltd., which discovered the Jabiluka uranium orebody. He was also chairman of the Uranium Institute, (now known as the World Nuclear Association).

Where has all the certainty gone? We never had more than a bit; but now the Covid monster has gobbled up much of what we had.

The lockdowns have knocked us off kilter. Our economic life has lost its bearings and we face challenges not only for today but ranging into long term alteration whose dimensions we can only imagine. As a restaurant owner said on TV, “It’s just been chaos, absolute chaos.”

Anxiety, the mortal enemy of certainty, is invading the field of mental health with fear of infection and displacement of careers. The stress of it all is even beckoning some people towards a tragic escape into the certainty of death. Neuroscientists have defined the essence of stress as the state of uncertainty; it provides high-octane fuel for worry.

Where do we find certainty in an uncertain world? The question brings to mind the role that certainty and its opposite play in the great drama of life. They’re type cast actors aiding us in our perceptions of good and ill like a lighthouse guiding ships in the night.

Moments of certainty exist sometimes for everyone, but possibly the most famous example is the case of Archimedes and his bathtub.

Hiero, the tyrant of Syracuse, used to recruit him for particularly difficult tasks, as he was reputed to be the wisest man in the realm. In gratitude for a pivotal victory in battle heralding his rule, Hiero commissioned the court goldsmith to create a gold votive offering to the gods, shaped as a laurel wreath.

The goldsmith presented Hiero with a magnificent one, but as soon as he did rumours began to fly around. Was it really pure gold or was silver added to reduce the cost? To settle the issue, Archimedes was called in.

For days the great physicist pondered the problem but could find no solution, try as he might. He was seized with worry, as he knew Hiero was a demanding monarch. Then, one day when he was at the public baths, as he was lowering himself into the cool bathtub at the end of the bathing process, he observed that the water level rose, spilling over the edges. In a flash an idea came.

What if he could use the fact that the volume of water displaced equaled the volume of an object such as his body that went into it? If so, he could apply that insight to determine whether the wreath was pure gold or not.

All he had to do was measure the volume of the wreath against the volume of a lump of pure gold that weighed the same, by putting the wreath in a tub of water filled to the brim, and then putting the lump of gold into the same tub (after he had emptied it), filling it back up. If the amount of water spilled by the wreath was greater than what was spilled by the lump of gold he would know the wreath was impure because if it was adulterated, say with silver, it would have a greater volume than the gold lump of equal weight, gold being nearly twice as heavy as silver.

The revelation, sparking with the certainty of truth, so excited Archimedes that he jumped out of his bath and rushed into the street, running all the way home, naked and soaking wet, shouting “Eureka” (I have found it). His sense of certainty was justified, for it led to a new law of physics – the Archimedes principle.

As it turned out, the rumours were right; Archimedes proved that the goldsmith had in fact cheated, with silver. We can only guess what happened to him; Hiero was a tyrant after all.

Ardent reliance on the perception of certainty lifts confidence in action, as we often see in leaders, expressed either in good sense or in error. Its influence is so fundamental to our thinking and emotions that philosophers, scientists, religious leaders and politicians take great pains to deal with it, and always have.

What is certainty? Like the issue of truth, and fundamentally related to it, its definition has exercised the human mind since before history. After much discussion over the eons, it has been generally accepted that it exists, if at all, in two forms. The first, objective or absolute certainty, lies in the knowledge –based belief in something about which there is no rational basis to doubt, whose truth is not given to mere degrees of probability. An example would be the mathematical proposition that the angles of all triangles add to 180 degrees. But then along came Heisenberg with his principle of uncertainty. He showed that at the subatomic level certainty does not exist; it must yield to probability, however close to certainty.

Skeptics long have doubted whether there can be any certainty at all. Democritus opined, “we in actuality grasp nothing for certain but what shifts in accordance with the condition of the body and of the atoms which enter it and press upon it.” And Heraclitus compounded the problem by introducing the concept of change, a phenomenon that undermines certainty. An entity that undergoes change, and everything does according to him, calls into question the certainty of its identity. Famously he said; “no man can step into the same river twice”. If so, what is the nature of the river we see?

Benjamin Franklin carried on the skepticism, saying that while the new constitution he helped to craft had the appearance of permanence, “Nothing can be certain except death and taxes.”

On the other hand, Rene Descartes disagrees with a total denial of certainty, citing human life as an example. In the case of himself, the fact that he is conscious means he is certain to exist. In support of this he says: “Cogito ergo sum” (I think therefore I am). It is implied that the observation applies to others too.

Nevertheless, when it comes to most things, he is a champion of doubt, the grit in the oyster shell of thought, the enemy of certainty but the progenitor of knowledge. He handles the conundrum of whether certainty applies in specific cases by taking refuge in agnosticism – advocating a suspension of judgment about beliefs that are even slightly uncertain.

Avoiding the risk of being wrong is cognate with the famous Pascal wager. The renowned 17th century French mathematician and philosopher dealt with the uncertainty felt by many at the time whether God exists by opining that a rational person should behave as though He does exist. If God does not exist they will not lose much, but if He does they stand to gain all that is promised in Christian theology.

In any event, the issue of uncertainty is clouded by internal contradiction. Pascal sighed, “It is not certain that everything is uncertain.”

The second form, subjective certainty (sometimes called moral certainty), is more open to verification because it depends on a feeling; a state of mind that the individual knows for certain exists. The belief itself is a state of certainty. It refers to the highest possible level of belief that something is true, regardless of whether or not it is capable of being false.

In most instances we make decisions based on a probability that we know is less than a moral certainty. We have to if we are to get anything done. Indeed we criticize people who can’t make up their mind as vacillating. But in cases where a negative outcome of a wrong decision can be personally calamitous we tend to require moral certainty before we take the risk.

As a youngster, on some cold winter days I would skate on the bay that separates Toronto from a small island in Lake Ontario. It was a wonderful foray into freedom uninterrupted by boundaries, and comforted by a feeling of moral certainty that the ice wouldn’t crack. I only went on deeply freezing days, when the ice appeared thick, with water daring not to appear. There didn’t seem to be any possibility of falling in, fatal though that would be. That was enough for me; I didn’t think of any possibility that I could be mistaken. But of course I could have been.

Moral certainty can lead to mistakes, even ridiculous ones. One time I was walking through a Mopani forest in Botswana’s Okavango region on safari with a guide who was a friend. Suddenly he said, “Look at those nuts on the ground; they’re good eating; try one”. Certain he was right, I did; and as soon as I started chewing, he and our Black African trackers doubled over in laughter. What I had put into my mouth was a giraffe dropping, small and round. It tasted like dried grass.

However, moral certainty has a more serious application. It is the basis of judgment in criminal law. There, two possible states of belief can exist, one level of certainty higher than the other, but both subjective and given to falsification. In cases based on direct evidence, the accused’s guilt must be of a degree of certainty defined as beyond a reasonable doubt. And in a case dependent upon circumstantial evidence, the finding of guilt must be based on the only rational conclusion the court could come to. Notwithstanding this guide, error can intervene, and sometimes does.

Pyrrho, acknowledged as the first Greek skeptic philosopher, turned the acceptance that nothing is certain into a psychological benefit. By ruling out the possibility of certainty, the worry about whether something is certain or not falls away, allowing tranquility to spread into the consciousness of the individual, a benign state he called ataraxia. After him, the Epicureans and the Stoics explored it at depth. Pyrrho had traveled east with Alexander the Great’s troops and encountered Buddhism, a form of thinking that concentrates on calming the perturbations of the mind.

Pyrrho’s remedy for worry takes intense discipline, in his case sometimes practised beyond the limits of good sense. It is recorded that he was so committed to his proposition that, at one time when he was walking in the direction of a precipice, at the brink his friends had to pull him back suddenly before he fell over. Blithely applying the logic of his philosophy he refused to be concerned about whether the danger was certain or not.

The quest for certainty underlies thinking at the deepest level, for it provides a base of security, a sense of stability, without which there would be no meaning in life. All religions and political systems are animated by it.

A consciousness of certainty was critical to the renowned longevity of ancient Egypt. The religious and political systems of that profoundly admired civilization were dedicated to it, arguably to a greater degree than in most other societies.

The people were blessed with an environment that stimulated the sentiment.
The eternal Nile spilled its moist and fertile silt onto the land in a regularity that generated one of the most fecund agricultural economies in history. That sometimes its floodwaters would register too high or too low on the Nilometer did nothing to detract from the sense of certainty it afforded at a fundamental level. And the formidable desert that surrounded the population like the protective arms of a Titan was certain to keep the nation safe from foreign marauders. But, above all, the ceaseless transit of the sun, rising next to the great river of life each day without fail and dying west of its waters only to be resurrected on the other side in the morning, gave proof that the gods had bestowed a benign certainty on their favoured people.

The sun’s predictable journey encouraged the belief that underlying the entire universe is a holiness and unity out of which a cosmic harmony is composed. While this hallowed state maintains its certainty, nothing can threaten a return to chaos, the formless disorder out of which gods and humans had emerged.

Chaos was the big fear, chaos in all its manifestations, from civil breakdown to natural catastrophe. Though well before the Second Law of Thermodynamics was revealed, the Egyptians intuitively knew that in an enclosed system, such as a nation, over time order tends to degrade into the uncertainty of disorder. It was central to Egyptian thinking. Only the energy of the state in harmony with the cosmos could preserve the ordered certainty that was required to sustain civilization.

The Egyptians developed a system of how people should behave so as to avoid chaos, worshipping a goddess who would provide guidance. Her name was Maat, whose identifying symbol was the feather of truth. She represented the ethical and moral requirement of all Egyptians to act with honor and truth. Where Maat was present, cosmic harmony followed; where she was ignored, disturbances arose, both in the individual and the state. Nothing was more certain.

The basic spiritual principles of the ancient Egyptians have flowed down the ages to inform religions that came after, notably different though they are in important respects. Among other things, they demonstrate that a sense of ultimate certainty, which is vital to a life of well-being, requires symbols to animate it. These can be temples or other places of worship where deities are present, but they can also be special buildings dedicated to secular affairs such as political governance.

The truth of this sprung to life in the shocking drama of January 6, 2021, when a frenzied mob incited by a President who refused to accept his electoral loss attacked the Capitol of the United States of America. Symbolically named after the Capitoline, one of the Seven Hills of Rome, on which the temple of Jupiter resided, and standing on high, the building houses the bicameral legislature, representative of the peoples’ will.

Rioters, fired up by unsubstantiated claims by President Trump that electoral fraud was the cause of his loss, rushed up the steps and broke windows to enter the legislative chambers and even the office of the Speaker of the House. Never since the British burned the building in 1814 during the War of 1812, had the Capitol been so assaulted.

The desecration tore the nation’s soul. It violated the sacred symbol of the peoples’ spirit and for a moment shook it from its uplifting demonstration of certainty, a sentiment held by all, ironically probably even the rioters as they tried to smash it.

At times, conditions of life fall into a state of unbearable horror, propelling the sufferer, in desperation, to search for comfort in some benign certainty wherever it can be found. Such was the case when in the 14th Century the Black Death stalked the lands of Europe and scythed down one in three in a ghastly death of fever and suppurating boils the size of an egg.

Random it was but so ever-present that everyone woke each morning in dread of seeing the swelling on their skin that contained the bubo, the fateful sign of mortality. Giovanni Boccaccio, a contemporary and forerunner of humanism wrote, “How many valiant men, how many fair ladies, breakfast with their kinfolk and the same night sup with their ancestors in the next world.” He spoke of, “vast multitudes of bodies, which were heaped by the hundred in vast trenches, like goods in a ship’s hold and covered with a little earth.”

It was accepted that the Black Death was God’s punishment for the sins of the current generation, so prayers for relief were not likely to be answered. Salvation had to lie elsewhere, outside the mortal coil. The after life was the only place. The dreaded uncertainty concentrated the mind to a pitch unprecedented even in that deeply religious period. It was the only escape from the horror and the only source of comfort that could make the calamitous threats bearable. Unfortunates can no longer suffer when they do not exist in this world. Treatises, called “the art of dying” were written that advised Christians how to prepare their souls for their passage, which could arrive at any time. They stressed the fragility of life and despised the vanity of earthly glories.

Uncertainty isn’t always a prompt to negative or escapist sentiments. Sometimes it creates enjoyable interest. Wouldn’t life be boring without it? Films, plays and sporting contests are dependent on it. Indeed suspense, uncertainty’s tease, is one of the characteristics demanded of what aspires to be dramatic. It’s included in the formal definition of drama. Little interest is aroused when we know the ending.

And sometimes a similar uncertainty stirs us in real life. The 2020 presidential election in the United States was such an event. For those passionately involved in the outcome together with those but peripherally affected, few theatrical or sporting contests could match its drama for compelling suspense and intriguing dramatis personae. It was of a stagecraft worthy of Shakespeare or Sophocles. A Capulet – Montague hatred and violence divided the country as never before since the Civil War, and the two principal players were as different from each other as imagination could conceive.

Possibly the uncertainty that stirs the greatest concern and, indeed controversy, in the world today resides in the challenge of Climate Change. That the globe is recording higher mean temperatures, year by year, is a fact cognate with objective certainty (if it were ever to exist) and that it is in a warming cycle destined to continue to some extent seems to be a moral certainty.

However, the amount of human contribution to the cause of the movements (implying a moral duty to take remedial action) and the prospective degree of future warming reside in a state of probability generated by scientific modeling, which by its mechanism is influenced by falsifiable assumptions, however astute. Some people claim that to be a moral certainty; others deny it. No one can prove it to be an objective certainty, but that is not necessary, for human action almost never requires that degree of certainty.

In the face of so much uncertainty and possibility of harm, it would seem that there is a role for the precautionary principle here. Many people think so. This is a philosophical approach (arising in 1970’s Germany) to dangerous problems that lack sufficient scientific knowledge to solve. It has been defined as, “caution practised in the context of uncertainty.” In a way it is similar to what Pascal wanted to do, – have a bet both ways. Or what insurance does in balancing the cost of the premium with the possibility of loss.

While applying this principle would not eliminate controversy over the cost and nature of actions to be taken to deal with Climate Change, it would at least provide a sound basis for taking some action rather than ignoring the problem on the grounds of the incertitude surrounding the nature of its existence.

Human life is bounded by a constant of uncertainty, but interludes exist of what can reasonably pass for the appearance of certainty. They create a rhythm for history’s verse. The twentieth century’s martial turbulence gave way to a double decade of perceived stability in the Western world that linked traditional values and economic reconstruction to a widespread feeling of social certainty.

All that changed in the social revolution of the 1970s where human values began to be interpreted differently. In 1977 the noted economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, wrote a book entitled The Age of Uncertainty. In it he opined, “In the last century capitalists were certain of the success of capitalism, socialist of socialism, imperialists of colonialism, and the ruling classes knew they were meant to rule. Little of this certainty now survives.”

And he wrote this before the explosion of computing capacity, the arrival of the Internet and the discombobulating social media. At the time, experiences of pandemics were not allowed out of the history books.

Gargantuan inventions always foment widespread change, and uncertainty is their confederate, for science is a struggle with uncertainty. Salient instances include the 4th millennium BCE creation of writing and the 15th century printing press. Both altered human society to a condition unrecognizable to prior generations. And today, to a degree equally if not more determinant, we have the computer and its daughter product the digital revolution. All these changes give proof to the unalterable law of the universe that everything, including life, moves inexorably towards greater complexity, abandoning stations along the way where the simplicity of certainty seems to reside.

However, though many-dimension uncertainty is as unavoidable as evolution, we can take comfort in the sense of certainty that continues to thrive in our souls. The love we feel for our family and friends, the trust we repose where warranted, the faith we have in humanity, and for many, in God, sustain the quality of certainty within us that gives meaning to life.

Scott Morrison in his recent national energy address given symbolically at the Tomago aluminium smelter in NSW that is beset by energy costs enunciated three guiding objectives for energy policy, including ensuring “a resilient energy system through a balanced mix of technologies.

The growing consensus is that Australia eventually will ditch its largest and most reliable source of energy, coal, on which it has depended for 100 years or more. We’ll need base load energy sources if we’re to maintain living standards. Yet the only logical replacement for coal is nuclear, which offers emission-free and reliable base load capacity. It is used in 31 countries and supplies 11 per cent of the world’s electricity (15% in Canada, 20 percent in the US, 70 percent in France) with 13 countries building capacity.

Nuclear technology has changed dramatically during the past decade, a point acknowledged by the Member for Fairfax, Ted O’Brien, who chaired last year’s parliamentary committee inquiring into the possibility of using nuclear power, but ignored by its opponents.

The two most dramatic advances have been in waste disposal and the development of small modular reactors. The waste issue has been the greatest barrier in Australia to consideration of nuclear and the excuse used by most opponents to silence supporters. Finland, which has four nuclear reactors and is building a fifth to replace its coal-fired generation, has solved the waste issue while proving a good example for Australia in dealing with this issue.

Finnish waste management company Posiva announced a significant building services agreement as part of a series of contracts already concluded relating to the construction of a nuclear waste disposal facility on Finland’s west coast.

Using a version of the vitrification technology developed in France and refined in other parts of the world including Australia with its Synroc technology- the waste will be incorporated into borosilicate, a glass impervious to water, the problematic mobilizing agent that must be thwarted. It will then be encased in metal canisters and deposited deep underground in granite bedrock that has been free of tectonic movement for millions of years and is forecast to remain stable for many millions of years to come.

Posiva has already received in-principle approval from the Finnish parliament and a construction licence from the government. The local community of about 10,000, which has been extensively consulted, supports it. The way is clear for completing the construction, securing an operating licence and commissioning the repository by 2023.

The Finns are confident that it will prove to the world once and for all that high-level nuclear waste can be handled safely and permanently.

The world is moving quickly towards development of small modular reactors. Defined as having a capacity of less than 300 megawatts- but some as small as 5 MW- these reactors are built in factories to standard designs and can be placed in line to provide larger capacities.

The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has just issued NuScale Power, the leading American company in the field, with a final safety evaluation report, the first for an American SMR. Four Canadian provinces have joined in support for the development of SMRs.

A few months ago Russia commissioned a floating nuclear power plant that carries two 35 MW reactors. It is now connected to the grid.

China is building its version of an SMR in Hainan province. The chief engineer of China’s State Power Investment Corporation told the World Nuclear Association’s annual conference this month: “We also use modular construction, with a shorter construction period, and this has enhanced economic performance.

The chief executive of GE Hitachi, one of the leading providers of advanced reactors, said at that conference the flexibility of SMRs means they will be able to support a variety of activities beyond electricity generation, providing cost competitive and environmentally friendly power for uses such as hydrogen production, desalination, district heating and industrial use.

SMRs would be ideal for us. They are readily transportable and ideal for regional areas. They can be placed quickly in sites where coal fired plants have been decommissioned, connecting to the existing grid and replacing the base load capacity. But Australia sits paralysed, with no base load options for the future, while the nuclear world moves on apace.

Energy Minister Angus Taylor has put nuclear on a “watching brief in his “technology roadmap. At least he hasn’t ruled it out.

John Maynard Keanes gave Australians a rationale for a rethinking on nuclear with that famous remark: When the facts change, I change my mind.

Reference

Tony Grey was the founder and chief executive of Pancontinental Mining Ltd, which discovered the Jabiluka uranium orebody. He was also chairman of the Uranium Institute, now named the World Nuclear Association.

The Covid – 19 pandemic has forced me to reflect on many things, of the sanctity and fragility of human life, of its entanglement with economic activity, of the role of science, and, most of all, connection, the substrate that links them all together. In its Latin origin the word means to bind, and that’s what connection does, at all levels.

Our reverence for human life impels us these days to take measures that threaten connection at the social level and that in turn connects with economic action, vital not only to wealth creation but mental health as well. And the furious activity by bio- chemists the world over to find a vaccine binds all in a huge cluster of hope.

The defence of social distancing, adopted by every society to stem the viral hydra, requires human connection to be broken, or at least significantly curtailed. The strictness of the measures taken to do this fluctuates over time and where they operate, but always some form of disconnection is the product.

The discomfort, indeed pain, felt by virtually everyone, some more than others, from breaking apart the normal, everyday connection with others, their family, their friends, their colleagues at work, even strangers in some degree, has bent the limits of tolerance.  Rates of depression and anxiety, even suicide, have flared up throughout communities like a parallel plague. All this is visceral witness to the need for connection. Besides, trust and co-operation, even altruism, are known to pulsate in its heart.

We usually extol connection in human matters, but unavoidably its opposite exists, for example, in family breakups, litigation, polarization in politics, and wars, as well as pandemic separation.  At the international level, the connective web of globalization is being torn. We see this in the divisive rhetoric between China and Western nations about the origin of the frightening virus, and by implication the blame for it.

We cannot fully appreciate connection without acknowledging its opposite, for its identity depends to some extent on the potential for, as well as the actuality of, disconnection. Connection comes first and informs the nature of its opposite, which cannot exist without its antecedent. In a sense they form a unity of opposites, a general idea posited by Heraclitus. The Greeks gave us a metaphor in illustration. When establishing his shrine at Delphi, Apollo, excited by the venture, rushed up one side of Mount Parnassus and, at the top dashed down the opposite side. The paths up and down are really part of the same path.

Pythagoras was the first of several philosophers to produce a table of opposites. It contained ten, including one and many, light and darkness, good and evil.  He might have, but didn’t include connection and disconnection.  Anaximander observed that the world exists in a continual struggle of opposites. They’re ordained in nature, the one ineluctably linked to the other in a certain kind of way, and out of this, everything is created.

Connection and disconnection are fundamental not only in human affairs but also at every level of existence, from height to depth. They’re all around us and in us everywhere, even though often we don’t notice them. They compose the rhythm of the universe.  That’s why we feel them so profoundly.

It’s possible to perceive the Big Bang as a cataclysmic disconnection event that set in motion eternal waves of connection and disconnection. The majestic drama acts by connective attraction and repulsion in all aspects of existence, from the collection of tiny particles forming small entities to the huge agglomerations of gas and dust that create the stars.

Once bound together, all are destined to break apart and connect again in a different guise, and then disconnect, only to connect once more to make a new identity, all done in a constant repetition of process lasting until the end of time.

And so, it’s inevitable that the phenomenon is at the basis of human creation, giving breath to what Aristotle said, “Man is by nature a social animal and naturally constituted to live in company”.  The force of connection drives humanity’s social urge in an incessant beat, leading us all, without exception, in the great dance of life. It animates us from conception to death; and even after, embedded in the memory of loved ones left behind.

The desire to live in company is most noticeably expressed in the family, where, ordinarily, connective forces are strongest, and where ‘the other’ is outside the boundary.

The truth of it all is in John Donne’s observation, “No man is an island entire of itself”. From the time we reach out to touch our mothers, tiny on our continent, we search for human connections and never cease. As we mature, we learn to liberate ourselves from early self –centredness, making the quest more productive. Nature smiles when we find connections and frowns when we do not.

Indeed this was the essence of the moral behind the Greek myth of Narcissus. The conspicuously handsome youth was so bound to the absorbing fascination of his beautiful reflection in the pool that he could not form a connection with another. Echo and the wood nymphs who were in love with him, were shut out, their pleas unheard.

Always on the look- out for behavior that affronts nature, Nemesis, the goddess of divine retribution, punished him with a self-destructive death and reconfiguration into a little yellow flower. It was his refusal of human connection, attributable to excessive self-love, which did him in. Today we use the word narcissism to describe the self-centred condition that seems to be increasingly prevalent in our society. Though not nearly as pronounced as in the myth, it’s one that tends to loosen the bonds of connection that we naturally live by, and in some instances snap them.  In that sense it operates in denial of who we really are, and in extreme cases among individuals, diminishes their mental health, a state that experts say calls for being in touch with reality.

Our brains, too, take up the theme of connection. Neurons, which are the basic structural and functional units of the nervous system, form a meticulous inter-connective network, communicating with each other constantly. With almost ninety billion of them in the human brain, they operate through more than a hundred trillion synapses, or connections. Their functions are de rigueur for a healthy person. When disconnections occur, unpleasant abnormalities follow – stroke, depression, dementia, and a host of others.

Neural activity displays another aspect of connection, one that can occur elsewhere as well. As the famous neuropsychologist, Donald Hebb, pointed out, any two neurons that are connected in activity at the same time tend to become associated so that activity in one facilitates activity in the other. If scaled up, this type of connection and its positive effect can be seen to apply to the whole person when connected with another. Team – work could be said to be based on this principle.

We tend to look for connection everywhere, sharpening our eyes when it’s difficult to find. Sometimes the most affecting are among people who normally oppose one another.  The Christmas Truce of World War One is arguably the most extraordinary case of this. There, influenced by the entreaties of Pope Benedict XV, soldiers of both sides along the Western Front stopped firing and climbed out of their trenches to exchange greetings in the cold white frost of Christmas Eve.  For a while, the songs of Silent Night and Auld Lang Syne, sung in language unintelligible to the other side, flowed across the terrible no-man’s land like a magic arm and connected the bitter enemies in a common bond of humanity. Then, inevitably the connection broke.

A more recent case occurred during the Black Lives Matter march in the USA, protesting against the police murder of George Floyd. There the protagonists were the marchers and the police, with implacable hatred sparking the air. The sheriff of Flint, Michigan, facing a crowd shouting threats and obscenities at him and his fellow police officers, slowly took off his helmet and laid down his baton. After the protesters got over momentary shock, they said in unison, “Walk with us”. And he did. He even gave a protester a hug. One of them said on TV that the sheriff gave a message of hope that peace was coming. And for a moment the enemies were connected.

Today’s lock down constraints are accepted as prudent but not infrequently avoided, even against the rules. Sometimes they’re circumvented lawfully by permitted gatherings, by zoom, by social media. We’re always thinking of ways; so painfully unnatural does it feel to be isolated, so strange, and so contrary to our sense of identity. We’re not allowed to be what we are. Our only consolation is that we expect it to be temporary.

Connection is so vital that we recruit the arts to provide it. Music is an especially connective force, for the players as well as the listeners. Its structure guarantees it.  The seminal agreement between the imagination and the arrangement of sound gives it form. The notes connect to each other to create the rhythm, the melody, the harmony. Rebellious notes leave the home, transform and come home again. In their purpose of connection with the listener they penetrate the brain’s amygdala, the centre for integrating emotions.

And, of course, language is a crucial connector, not only in everyday conversation but also in stories, stories told by people about the history of their culture, of tribulations, of moral challenges, of victory over adversity, of great ancestors that give identity to the people.  Homer’s epics, the Bible, Australian Dreamtime stories, and many others, all provide substance to the connecting force of narrative, which animates culture and gives it meaning. My tribal elder friend, Big Bill Neidjie, once told me by the fire on a camping trip as he fell sad about the gradual leaking away of Aboriginal tradition, “When the people forget their story their culture dies.” Disappearing with it is a primary connection.

Connection can also arise by chance, from being in a place where it just happens. Though in a sense abstract, it can be so deep as to inform a life, a linkage that never breaks.  So it was with me.

I grew up in a household joined to Shakespeare. My parents were actors in London’s Old Vic; they met there. They took me, as an infant born in London, to Canada while on a tour of the bard’s plays and stayed in Toronto, where I grew up. Several years later they were walking in the quadrangle of Trinity College, part of the University of Toronto and modeled architecturally after the Gothic beauty in Cambridge. They had played Shakespeare in the open air at Regent’s Park and knew its magic on a warm summer’s night. And so they started Canada’s first Shakespeare festival, beginning with Twelfth Night in Toronto’s open air.

I remember our house vibrating with Shakespearean sounds as my father and mother rehearsed their lines in different rooms. Being so immersed in it I was desperate to play a part in the productions.  And then, a few years after my voice changed, I was allowed to play Curio in Twelfth Night – in grease paint for the first time and wearing a beard stuck on with spirit gum to make me look older. I had only one line. To distract the love -tormented Orsino from his obsession with Olivia I barked out, “Will you go hunt my lord?”

Anyone who has been on the stage knows the magical connection that can arise with the audience when the production goes well. It can be felt as clearly as a hug.

As I grew older I played more parts, spending the summers with Shakespeare in the Quadrangle. It was one of the most exciting experiences of my life, always in breathless anticipation at the beginning of the season to hear what part my father would give me. Over time I deepened my connection, playing Malcolm, Lorenzo, Ferdinand, Edgar, and ultimately Hamlet.

The connection I have with the inspirational playwright never escapes from my heart. Even though I left the theatre for law and then business I have never separated from Shakespeare’s vision of humanity and immortal language. Throughout life’s distractions and time’s interruptions he is always there, even when below the threshold of awareness.

The prescient playwright was the non-pareil in dramatizing connections – Hamlet and his murdered father, Lear and Cordelia, Prospero and Ariel, Oberon and Puck, Romeo and Juliet and so many others.  Whenever I am asked to say something about the connection that underlies friendship I quote Polonius’ advice to his son on the eve of his going to France.

 “Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried Grapple them unto your soul with hoops of steel.”

Connection can appear in more aspects than can be listed, except in cyber memory and perhaps not even there, but a salient one, one that embraces the human core with elemental vigor is the pull of place. There, its form can generate a sense of belonging, a blessing so vital that without its presence, soul – choking loneliness grows. Some of the most powerful places are the home, the village, town, city or country, sometimes the work place and, in the case of Aboriginal culture, the land, the place where ancestors and creator forces roamed.

Connection with a place felt to be sacred has universal presence, unlimited by time. Sumerian and Egyptian temples brought the spirit of their gods into contact with humans, and the Greeks endowed the shrine of Delphi with the protection and clairvoyance of Apollo. The connection famously includes Asian places of worship. All religious structures are community connectors. It’s not by accident that the word ‘religion’ comes from the Greek ‘ligo’, to bind together. And all connect with a higher power.

In a sense, the act of human connection implies leaving, a departure from one state towards another; through the movement creation of a sort arises. In cases of positive human experience, the action liberates the ego from the staleness of self -absorption to produce something that matters, even something as simple as a sense of well –being. Sufis have an exercise to manifest this.  A master once told me to look at a tree on the distant horizon and imagine connecting with it.  I tried it and when I did, I felt a release of care and a certain exhilaration as my mind reached across the space and touched the green branches in the sky. I do it from time to time if I feel anxious or a little blue.

Never before in living memory have we experienced the disconnecting effect of pandemic like this. It’s not that plagues are new, except to our direct experience. We know of the Black Death that carried off a third to a half of Europe’s population in the 14^th century and of recurring leprosy outbreaks that led to ostracizing the sufferers in colonies. And the Spanish flu of 1918 with its doubling of deaths a year later is often cited. People must have felt the disconnection in excruciating pain, undoubtedly more savage than we suffer. But, while history gives perspective, it’s the present that generates the emotion.

Unlike in past times, we have alternative means now to connect – the telephone and zoom, digital technology. Indeed, social media has for long been a way to connect, often supplanting the face-to-face sort.  But the anxiety and loneliness so widely felt in the Covid days show up the hollowness of that method. We can indeed connect remotely, but connection prefers closeness; it shuns distance.

Love, together with kindness its daughter product, is the strongest connective force among humans there is – a first principle. In the midst of Covid fear and worry, when it might have been expected that people, torn by self- preservation, would descend further into disconnection, kindness has ridden to the rescue.

Despite some silly exceptions like toilet paper fever causing a few outliers to grab and push, kindness, animated by ideas and actions, has emerged as a new social norm, universally encouraged by all media and their celebrities.  It might not outlast the Covid experience but at least it shows its worth and waves its wand over people for now.  Across the distance it’s bringing strangers together in a spirit of natural co-operation. As Shakespeare said, “One touch of nature makes the whole world kin.”

Like the tide coming in to connect the sea with the land, raising boats left stranded on the sand, the feeling of kindness is inching along to connect people with each other and uplift their morale by acknowledging, as is so often and comfortingly expressed, that we are all in this together. The sentiment resonates with the exhortation of Leviticus to love your neighbor as thyself and gives substance to the aphorism in Proverbs, “A brother is born for a time of adversity.”

We are in the Age of Science. The human brain is pushing knowledge further and further into the abyssal dark of the unknown.

The prominence of science has never reached such heights. It reigns as the dominant cultural entity, the most exciting hero of the human struggle, eclipsing the high arts, literature and religion, endeavours that used to win the supreme laurel wreaths in times past. Today, a Nobel Prize in physics draws far more prestige than one in literature. The technology science inspires is letting loose life-changing forces, conscripting talent and penetrating social norms that have traditionally fertilized the other fields.

Science is widely accepted as the window into reality, the real world. But, what does that mean? It’s undoubtedly true in the material sense, but there are other activities of the human mind that experience reality, reality of a different sort. As Hamlet says, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” His close friend was a Stoic, a man Hamlet admired for his rational adherence to reality, the material kind.

There is arguably more likelihood these days than in Shakespeare’s imagination that our focus is too narrow.

The term science, coming from the Latin scientia, meaning knowledge, was coined in the 19th century. Before that, the activity was called natural philosophy because its operation was to enquire into nature, meaning the physical world. The restless curiosity of the human species to understand, to make sense of what surrounds it and to improve its life by harnessing the fruits of observation, experimentation and rational conclusion must have animated even the earliest hominids. Homo habilis most probably would have used a stick, then a stone-carved stick, to extract honey from the hole in the tree.

In earliest times, all enquiry was the province of one discipline, searching within one reality. In pharaonic Egypt, the priests, among the few literate people at the time, were in charge of looking into and understanding both the material and the spiritual worlds. What we regard as science and mathematics, religion and magic were all combined into one perception of reality, though often practiced in different specialties. Every purpose of the Egyptians, including that of their wondrous architecture and renowned medicine, was meant to express and glorify that unity. All worthwhile knowledge was perceived to emanate from the perfectly ordered and eternal harmony personified in the god Maat.

When, later, the Greeks achieved intellectual hegemony in the Mediterranean world, learning from the Egyptians (many, such as Pythagoras and Plato, studied there), they split the discipline into religion and philosophy, the latter covering not only the physical world but also mathematics and human behavior. It was a sensible division of labour, for some people lean one way, others another.

Greek natural philosophers examined nature in astonishing detail. They even looked far enough into it to reveal its granular form, discovering things beneath what the human eye could see. Democritus, considered the father of science and called the laughing philosopher for poking fun at human foibles, saw that everything was not all that it seems but is actually structures of atoms (Greek for that which cannot be cut). The theory has survived into modern science. And Heraclitus, given the moniker of the weeping philosopher for his constant state of depression, observed that all is subject to change, even that which seems eternal, like Tennyson’s babbling brook. He is credited with saying; “No man can step into the same river twice.”

Philosophers explained natural phenomena without resort to religion, the traditional source of understanding. Yet religion remained to animate perception, for the people needed an avenue to explain the unexplainable and to express their longing to relate to something beyond the fragility of the mortal state. Both modes of though had their place. And so an observation was born that there are different realities, each with its own compelling truth.

For many centuries natural philosophy, while universally recognized as an important discipline in its own right, was the junior partner of religion. In matters of the highest importance, perception of a reality conceived as spiritual prevailed, wherever observations of a material type clashed with faith.

The Galileo controversy started the process of reversing that. The point was reached where the apparent inconsistence between the two concepts of reality could no longer be tolerated and a wrenching choice for supremacy had to be made. By the 18th century, the only reality in the minds of an increasing number of people lay in the material world. And that is where we are today.

I love science, so fascinating, although, coming from a background in the humanities (classics, history and law), I have no formal training in it. Nevertheless, in my business career I have been involved productively with geoscientists (in mining) and physicists (in biotech). Some science has inevitably rubbed off on me, but of course only at the most superficial level, but one sufficient to instill in me a profound respect for its activity and practitioners. It has rightly captured hegemony at the present and offers our highest hope for progress in matters material, producing benefits, which if applied prudently, can lead to a state of greater human happiness than ever before.

But, as in all human endeavours, science has a category limitation, which gives rise to the need for another branch of thought if the full gamut of human potential is to flourish.  By itself, science is not fully satisfying. It lacks the means to liberate the soul and give substance to its yearning for something beyond the mundane.

Its commendable habit of accuracy and exactness in matters of fact needs an escape hatch so that another reality can be apprehended, one that allows imagination a full rein, untrammelled by the rigour of proof.

John Keats spoke of this when he accused the scientists of “unweaving the rainbow”, defending the importance of the arts, particularly poetry, in lifting the human soul into the joy of transcendence. And he said in the Ode to a Grecian Urn, a poetic simulacrum of classical aesthetics, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know and all ye need to know.” A bit hyperbolic in one sense, but he was speaking in the world of poetry, where infinite possibility can reign unfettered.

Traditionally, religion has been the principal resident of the transcendental domain and for many people it still is. However its presence in Western society seems to be diminishing, largely because of a perceived non-conformability with science. Of course, clerical misbehavior has exacerbated the decline.

However, I consider it an error to view science and religion, or its secular spiritual equivalent, as fundamentally inconsistent with each other, much less antagonistic.

In parallel with a deeper apprehension of the material world, thought in the incorporeal sphere can realize another reality, one animated by the sense of ultimate perfection, whether that be God or an inspirational conception of another sort. The perfect is the essence of the all.

Plato saw this. In his theory of Forms, he explained that all objects have a Form (or essence) that defines their reality, their physical appearance being merely an imitation of that. It is in the realm of thought that “truth and reason” can be produced to apprehend their true nature, their incorporeal aspect.

This approach to reality is available to people of faith and atheists alike, although its style of thought and action differ. Its transcendental nature rises above what appears to the senses (reality in the material world), and enters a different realm, one that may touch the material in a way through the imagination but is not overwhelmed by it. Nor does it threaten its truth. The essence of the rainbow is beyond unweaving.

This reality can be realized through various avenues; some elevating the human mind to its highest state, as in a religious or other spiritual experience, others to merely an interesting awareness.

An example of the latter can arise from the creation of an apparent identity change in a well-known object, by displaying it momentarily in a different state. The observer can encounter the familiar identity but see it in a new light. That is what happens in the wrapping of things for which Christo is famous.

I went to his project in Lake Iseo, the first major one executed after his wife and artistic partner died. The lake, two hundred and fifty metres deep and set about with picturesque mountains, is in the Alpine region near Bergamo. The project required seventy thousand metres of saffron fabric laid over a floating dock system of polyethylene cubes that took scuba divers to anchor into place.

Over its ephemeral period – only a matter of weeks, more than a million people walked on narrow, serpentine piers that crawled over the lake to Monte Isola, a small island. So low upon the surface, many said it was like walking on water. Christo called the project the Floating Piers.

Here was an instance where art showed its aesthetic power to transform, to act on an object and afford it a place in a different reality. A saffron ribbon slid gracefully across the water and brought the lake and its island together as never before, and through that action an expansion of its essence came into sight. Like Michelangelo who said he didn’t create his sculptures but merely released what was already in the stone, the art of Christo revealed a connective aspect of the lake whose potential had always been.

The lake before Christo was still there and would revert to its appearance quo ante after the Project ended, but its realized potential, in a sense a component of its essence, would remain, at least in the minds of the people who saw it. That was the reality of it all. It brings forth the observation that, as a result of its potential, reality should not be considered fixed. It is in a constant state of being.

Another appearance of reality, but of deeper significance, arose from an experience when I was travelling in Xinjiang along the Silk Roads, on their northern branch which gingerly skirts the deadly Taklimakan desert, a trap so fearsome that its name means, “Once you go in you never get out.”

There, the ancient Tien-Shan mountain range strikes east/west in sedimentary magnificence, rising out of the desert like a wall with no end. At times, haematite, salt, and green inclusions appear to cover it with a coat of many colours. Unruly rills etched by the wild rush of water towards underground aquifers give it the wrinkly face of a sage.

The range is called the Heavenly Mountains for its venerable procession of snow towers that reach to the clouds in otherworldly grace. Along the way it is brushed by shifting mists that blur its material state and stimulate the imagination to appreciate the majesty of its incorporeal form and link it to everything that matters.

Far away from humanity and its mundane obsessions, a celestial tranquility reigns in beauty. But underneath the calm, and only perceptible to geological examination, is the ceaseless action of tectonic violence that rages in continental conflict, upturning, deforming, suturing and creating huge fault zones between blocks, some of which go back to Gondwana times and others beyond. Within the chorus of the rocks, the rhythms of peace and conflict resonate in a timeless reality, which, like the whole mountain range, has a spiritual form.

If indeed there is an ultimate unity it must comprise the material and the spiritual. Both are participants in the march of reality. What goes on in the material world is one truth and in the spiritual consciousness another. They are complementary, and a perception of both is required to make animals human.

The book is based on a legend I heard while travelling in China’s far North West. There is a village in the Gobi desert where the people have European features mixed with Chinese. They believe they are the descendants of Roman legionaries who came along the Silk Road after a big battle two thousand years ago. Testing has confirmed that 56% of their DNA is European.

A Chinese historian writes about an encounter east of the Caspian Sea where observers recorded soldiers in a fish-scale formation. This could only have referred to the Roman practice of holding shields up over their heads to fend off arrows. It was called a “tortoise” or testudo in Latin. Hence the name of the book

In 53 BCE, forty thousand Roman troops invaded Parthia (now Iran) and lost, with half taken prisoner and marched to the eastern frontier in what is now Turkmenistan. Some could have escaped and walked along the Silk Road to China.

The opening of the book speaks of the lead up to the Battle of Carrhae where the Roman generals argue over strategy and engage Marcus, a young upwardly mobile centurion, for advice. The story moves through the battle to adventures along the Silk Road, which test Marcus to the core.

Essentially it is an allegory, on one level an adventure story, on others an evolution of Marcus’s character and an exploration of connections between East and West facilitated by the Silk Road, the communicator between cultures that have never met.

The opening up of China has revealed many wonders hidden from Western view for almost a century. I had always wanted to see them.

Some of these marvels lurk in China’s Far West, in Gansu, the thin sliver of a province set up against Mongolia. It hosts the Hexi Corridor and the Jade Gate through which the Silk Road exits the Middle Kingdom and confronts the fierce Taklamakan desert whose name means “If you go in you never get out”. The Corridor traditionally produced lavish crops of rhubarb, indigenous to the region, and one of the key goods transported along the Silk Road. It was in high demand as a laxative.

The Great Wall ends there in a magnificent flourish of Ming Dynasty masonry that also encompasses a well – preserved fort, complete with the famous false wall for luring enemy troops into a killing courtyard studded by archers on high. Visitors, myself included, are invited to stand on the walls and shoot straw-stuffed human effigies with arrows. An impressive museum crammed with local artifacts dating back thousands of years displays a vast lighted map showing the various sections of the Great Wall as they were built over the years.

  

I had occasion to visit Jiayuguan, a famous Silk Road town currently adorned with impressive outdoor sculptures. It’s the head office of Jisco, one of China’s largest steel companies, with whom I was conducting business. It gets its iron ore from the Qilian Mountains, which form the southern boundary of the Hexi Corridor and yield some of China’s best jade. My Chinese colleagues told me the region is very prospective for gold. They mentioned that the remoteness of the steel facility illustrates the strategic caution of the Central Government; it’s far away from from Russian and American bombers.

On one of my visits I was taken to the gantry that overlooks a gargantuan conveyor belt, over a kilometer long. It was lunchtime and the hot steel was coming out of the blast furnace in slabs and running on the belt, cooling along the way. Looking down, I saw a worker put his rice bowl on a slab, pick it up after a few meters and sit down to enjoy a fully cooked meal.

At another time, Jisco’s Chairman invited me to visit his wine cellar. Naturally I thought it would be a small, conventional one. But it was nothing of the sort. It was a massive structure of vaulted granite large enough to hold twenty thousand barrels of wine. It turned out that his company had recently developed a gigantic vineyard to create local employment. Inside, he introduced me to the maître de chai who told me the story.

Knowing nothing about wine, Jisco sent emissaries to Bordeaux to learn about Cabernet and Merlot, to Burgundy for Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, to the Rheingau for Riesling and even to Canada for its famous ice wine. They brought back not only wine makers but vine cuttings. While virtually no rain falls in the region, for it’s part of the Gobi desert, the nearby Qilian Mountains shed water into underground aquifers. To tap this resource they went to Israel for irrigation technology.

So they had the wine-making expertise, the cuttings and the irrigation know- how, everything they needed, except for one thing. There was no topsoil, only sand. So they imported enough from eastern China to cover six thousand hectares.

Now their vineyard supplies 10% of the burgeoning Chinese market, selling 90 million bottles a year of their brand, Zixuan Wine. I tasted some and it was definitely potable, faithful to its Western cepage.

While in Gansu I heard of a curious legend that animates a little village called Liqian. Through the auspices of Jisco I visited it with a history professor from Lanzou university. Its inhabitants have Caucasian features combined with Chinese. Some have blue or green eyes; others have long noses, fair hair. If that is not remarkable enough in this far away place, stranger still is the fact that they believe they are the descendants of Roman legionaries who came there along the Silk Road after a major battle in what is now Turkey, which the Romans lost.

This is reckoned so amazing that a local tourist industry has sprung up around it. Periodically, villagers dress up as Roman soldiers, complete with plumed helmet, breastplate and rectangular shield, and march through the main street up to a small Roman temple on a hill. Local artisans built it for the occasion. Tourists from miles around come to gawk at the spectacle and spend money on souvenirs.

Substance, if not proof, lies behind this curious belief, enough to afford it the status of legend. Chinese history records the Battle of the Talas River near the Caspian Sea fought between the Han Chinese and a Hun tribe where more than a hundred soldiers were arranged in what observers called a fish – scale formation. Scholars are convinced that the description fits the Roman practice of raising their shields in an interlocking manner; the appearance is like the scales of a tortoise. The technique was uniquely Roman.

Also, mention is made of a wooden palisade, a means of defence only Romans employed. The Talas engagement took place some time after the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE when Crassus, the richest man in Rome, led forty thousand troops to defeat at the hands of the Parthians (Iranians).

As would be expected, DNA samples have been taken of the villagers. They show that nearly 60% is of Caucasian origin. That doesn’t mean they are Roman descendants but it lends support to the theory. Proof must come from cultural evidence, which at this stage is only suggestive. Archaeological excavation is needed but as yet it has not been permitted.

All in all, Gansu is a fascinating place, one where great events stirred the ancient past and the unusual still happens today. Enough material evidence remains to allow a visitor to imagine many of those events, from times when minimal contact between East and West occurred to when goods and ideas travelled freely along the Silk Road, to when the nomadic way of life clashed with the sedentary giving rise to the Great Wall, and to when marauding barbarian hordes we know as Huns and Mongols ranged West to unsettle the European world.

I grew up in the theatre, Shakespearean theatre. My parents were classical actors in London’s Old Vic. On a world tour, they brought me to Toronto as an infant and stayed there, acting, my father writing radio plays and both eventually founding Canada’s first Shakespeare festival. As a youngster, and later acting in the plays, I was continually fascinated by the Bard’s use of history and faraway places to create dramatic situations. I suppose that set me on a course of studying history at university and positioning myself later so I could travel.

When I was a boy, I thought the word history was derived from story. I still do in a sense, even though now I realize it comes from the Greek term for inquiry and not story at all.  While inquiry underlies all, history I think should be written as a narrative. Doing that magnifies the interest inherent in human actions and wipes the dust off the facts. Shakespeare must have thought so.

His plays are shot through with the wonders of travel – a passing strange island, a Greek battlefield, a Danish castle, Italian renaissance cities, even ancient Rome. I suppose my desire to travel stemmed from that.  And travel connects with history, is informed by it.  Without a sense of the history of the place, the visitor might as well be looking at a cardboard cut out.

Deterred by the financial insecurity of the theatre I went into law. But that didn’t expunge my desire to travel. When I was practising I always put my hand up for any assignment that involved travelling. One of them resulted in my visiting Australia, where my life changed utterly. While there, the mining industry caught my eye; it was burgeoning at the time. World class discoveries were being made in clusters. I wanted to be part of it.

Through consultants, I learned of a prospective exploration licence, acquired it and founded a company to go exploring on it. Luckily we made a major discovery. That led me to give up the law and commit myself to business. And of course to live in Australia.  The adventure allowed me to travel even more (mines are usually in remote places), all over the world in fact, sometimes to very unusual places, western China for instance.

For a number of years I had gone travelling along the Silk Road with my wife who is an artist using photography as her medium. On different occasions, for a single trip would be too much, we went along it through Turkey and Iran into Uzbekistan where the romantic cities of Bukhara and Samarkand mark an important stage in Alexander the Great’s eastern expedition. On the other side of the Pamir Mountains we entered Xinjiang (formerly called Chinese Turkestan), skirted the fearsome Taklamakan Desert and passed through the Hexi Corridor in Gansu province, ending up eventually in Xian, its start.

The Silk Road’s fascination for me stems largely from its being one of the great connecting forces in history.  Through the goods and ideas the caravans brought it linked Rome and China, even at a time when neither knew of each other’s existence. My interest was as much philosophical as historical, for it symbolizes the salutary effects of communication.

On one of my business trips to Gansu, China’s far western province (at the end of the Great Wall), I learned of a curious legend. It stimulated my imagination because it combined a Silk Road adventure with a major historical event.

A little Gansu village in the Gobi desert contains people with part Caucasian features, strange in itself so faraway but unusual for another reason. They believe they are the descendants of Roman legionnaires who travelled along the Silk Road after a pivotal battle somewhere in the West. Periodically they dress up as Roman soldiers and march to the top of a hill where they have built a small Roman temple. A tourist trade has sprung up around the legend, attracting visitors to come and stare at these people who seem so odd, wearing costumes they have never seen before.

The legend is not without foundation. Testing has shown that almost 60% of their DNA is Caucasian. That doesn’t mean they are Roman but it adds credibility to the story. Also, Pliny writes that after the Battle of Carrhae in 53 BCE when forty thousand Roman troops invaded Parthia (now Iran) and lost, Roman prisoners were taken to the eastern frontier (now Turkmenistan). It is possible that some escaped and travelled along the Silk Road as far as Gansu.

We are privileged to be witnessing one of the most important events in history taking place, the rise once more of China – after decades of turmoil and tragedy. For a long time that country has been off limits to Westerners; now we can visit the many wonders that have been hidden for so long and see a little of what is going on behind the impressive statistics of economic growth.

Great strategic blunders will bedevil the world if we in the West and they in the East fail sufficiently to understand one another.  I wrote this book in part as a metaphor for the difficulties, the challenges and the possibilities of connection between us. The Silk Road is the agent.

The book, which is historical fiction, is an adventure story cast in the form of a journey undertaken by a young centurion and his comrades who are part of the Roman invasion (led by Crassus, the richest man in Rome). There are several themes but one of them is the effect of travel on the mentality of the main character. Disraeli said, “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow mindedness.”

While doing the research, which naturally included the history of the times and places, I was thunderstruck by the similarity of philosophy between ancient Greece and China. In the Analects of Confucius and the pre- Socratic thinkers I saw virtually the same approach to most of the basic issues of human nature. Some differences do exist but there are more similarities.

I chose as the title for the book “The Tortoise in Asia” because the tortoise (testudo in Latin) is the name given by the Romans to the military formation they adopted to defend against projectiles. They would hold their shields horizontal over their heads to create a carapace like a tortoise.

It was a tactic used only by Romans, nobody else. In fact it gave rise to one of the pieces of evidence that supports the legend. A Chinese historian records a battle east of the Caspian Sea where a Han army won a victory against the Huns, nomadic tribes which constantly invaded China from the north and against which the Great Wall was built. He speaks of the presence of a hundred and forty-five soldiers who were gathered in a “fish-scale formation.” That could only refer to a testudo.

In the book, the protagonist and his fellows employ the testudo in a number of battles as they penetrate the mysteries of the East on the Silk Road and meet strange people along the way, going possibly further than any western soldiers had gone up to that time.