These are the mines of Mount Pangaeos,' Philip explained. 'With this gold I have armed and equipped our army, I have built our palaces, I have developed Macedon's strentgh.'
'Why have you brought me here?' asked Alexander, his profound distress apparent in his voice. While he was asking the question one of the laboureres collapsed to the ground and almost ended up beneath his horse's hooves. An overseer made sure the man was dead, then nodded to another two poor wretches who put their baskets to one side, took the body by the feet and dragged it away.
'Why have you brought me here?' Alexander asked again. And Philip saw the leaden sky reflected in the dark expression on his son's face.
'You have not yet seen the worst of it,' he replied.'Do you feel up to going underground?'
'I am not afraid of anything.'stated the boy.
'Follow me then.'
The king dismounted and moved towards the entrance of one of the caves. The overseer who challenged him, holding up his whip, suddenly stopped in shock, recognizing the golden star of the Argeads on Philip's chest.
Philip simply nodded and the overseer stood back, ligt a lantern and prepared to guide them underground.
Alexander followed his father, but as soon as he entered the cave he felt himself suffocating in the unbearable stench of human urine, sweat and excrement. They had ti crouch. Sometimes with thei backs almost bent double, in a narrow passageway full of the din of continuous hammering, of a general breathlessness, of coughing, of the gutural rattles of death.
The overseer stopped occasionally where a group of men were working with their picks to extract the mineral-bearing rock. Here and there they stopped at the edge of a pit and down at the bottom the feeble glow of a lantern iluminated a bony back, joined to skeletal arms.
Once or twice the miners, down in these pits, on hearing the approach of footsteps or voices, lifted their heads and so Alexander witnessed the masks of men disfigured by fatigue, by illness and by the horror of living such a life.
Further on, at the botton of one pit, they saw a corpse.
'Many of them commit suicide,' the overseer explained. 'They throw themselves on their picks or stab themselves with their chisels.'
Philip turned to look at Alexander. The prince was silent and apparently numbed by this experience, and the darkness of death had fallen over his eyes.
They exited on the other side of the mountain through a narrow passage, and there were the horses and their escort waiting for them.
Alexander stared at his father,'What have these people done to deserve this?' he asked, his face waxen pale.
'Nothing,' replied the King.'Apart from being born.'
From the book: Alexander: Child of A Dream. By Valerio Massino Manfredi. Translated by Iain Halliday
