Fun with Fracking

Josh Fox: Gasland (2010)

Every now and then you have to stand up and be counted, no matter how politically powerless you may feel.

The other day Bronwyn and I finally nerved ourselves up to get out that documentary Gasland which had been staring at us from the shelves of our local video shop for the past year or so. A friend of ours had said that she couldn't sleep after watching it, and that it made her so mad that she wasn't sure whether she wanted to cry or kill someone.

Sounds like a real hoot, doesn't it? And so it proved. As the film made its quiet, understated way across vast devastated prairies of natural gas containers, through the kitchens of shell-shocked ranchers who could literally light their drinking water on fire (as they proceeded to demonstrate) - some of whom were already dying from the carcinogens that had been introduced into their water without any warning - down devastated streams festooned with dead animals, we felt as though the end of the world might have come at last.

Light 'em up

And - guess what? - it's all perfectly legal! The Bush government passed a bill in 2004 which stated that fracking (short for "hydraulic fracturing") is not subject to clean air and clean water legislation. And why not? Because it wouldn't be tolerated for a moment it it was! Because it's so desperately harmful to the environment - and human health - that if the burden of proof to show that it's safe were ever to be shifted to the industrial giants who use it, they'd all be out of business immediately (not to mention immured in court for the rest of their natural lives). So a very necessary piece of legislation, that one. Dick Cheney's idea. Good ol' Dick.

What's more, these myriad companies, with their innumerable different fracking "recipes", are not required to tell anyone exactly which bizarre and inimical chemicals they've been pumping into rock-seams, because it could be deemed "commercially sensitive information." So if you happen to be dying of cancer from the chemicals from a nearby Natural Gas installation, it's up to you to commission an independent study to find out exactly what they've been releasing into the air and the water near you. They don't have to tell you. Or anyone else.

Then, once you've actually started your lawsuit, chances are they'll settle out of court for an undisclosed sum - plus a commitment on your part never to communicate any details of the case to anyone. Only in America, huh? Free enterprise run mad: the right to poison and kill other people in the pursuit of profit ...

Welcome to the House of Fun

"We've got to make sure that it never happens here," said Bronwyn. "I mean it, Jack. We have to start a petition."

"Are you joking?" I said. "We're already doing it." (Though I didn't know, as I spoke, that it had been going on here for over twenty years).

A couple of nights later, we saw on the television news the present Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Dr Jan Wright, remark with a chuckle that - since she had such a small office - she hadn't yet got around to completing the large-scale report on the matter which she undertook last year.

What she has said so far, though, in advance of the full report, is that she sees no need for a moratorium but instead recommends "tighter controls" on the practice. With environmental watchdogs like that, who needs corporate lawyers? She certainly couldn't be accused of staying up nights worrying about it.

Oh, she did also comment, in passing, that "she couldn't rule out the possibility fracking could cause large earthquakes, like the series of tremors that destroyed much of Christchurch over 2010 and 2011."

Dr. Jan Wright

Correct me if I'm wrong - as I often am - but doesn't that seem rather a casual tone to take on a matter of such seriousness? "Whether fracking is acceptable in a given location will depend on a number of variables, including the location characteristics, the competency of the explorer, the way wastewater is disposed of and whether there is potential for aquifer contamination," states Gary Taylor of the Environmental Defence Society.

Quite so. But if no-one's actually investigating those things at all seriously (and who would, in a John-Key-led administration?), and if there's even a minuscule risk that the practice might have unforeseen long-term effects on the environment, such as seismic instability, as well as all the already well-known side-effects such as watertable contamination, air pollution, compromised health, etc. etc., wouldn't it be quite a good idea to check it out sometime soon? Just why is Jan Wright's office so small, anyway? And shouldn't there be a few other studies going on somewhere else, as well?

Now I do understand that fracking is not the only environmental nightmare that besets us. I also understand that proponents of even more obscene affronts to human existence such as nuclear fission can use opposition to fracking to argue for their own filthy ends. Nor am I blind to the fact that everyone who uses energy (as I'm doing right now by typing on this keyboard) has to get it from somewhere, from some large-scale industrial process which is bound to be ecologically disruptive at least some of the time.

As I watched Josh Fox's film, though, and saw the squad of fakes who'd been flown in to a Congressional Committee hearing on the subject all testifying one after the other that there was no evidence of adverse effects from fracking, and that all the cases to date which had been reported over the many states that allow it had already been investigated and found to be without substance, I was reminded of those Big Tobacco executives who used to testify routinely to the lack of evidence for adverse health effects from smoking cigarettes (as shown memorably in that old Al Pacino / Russell Crowe movie The Insider). Their lies were cut from the same cloth: not even intended to be believed by anyone, but simply stated in order to put them on the record for the purpose of kickstarting future avalanches of bureaucratic delay and confusion.

Michael Mann, dir.: The Insider (1999)

If there's ever a Nuremberg trial for crimes against the environment, I fear that these guys and their bosses may find that simple obedience to orders is not an acceptable excuse. And can anyone seriously doubt that these industrialists - together with the chemists and lawyers and politicians they employ - are all equally culpable of conniving at the systematic degradation of the air and water all of us depend on for life?

Personally , I don't want to see any more laughing and kidding around at press conferences on the subject in future. It's not particularly funny that no resources are being put into investigating it here, just as virtually none have been allotted to checking up on it in the USA.

Since our present government apparently regards any enquiry into their activities which doesn't actually convict them of criminal misconduct and recommend immediate prosecution as a clear green light (the Sky City Convention Centre affair, for example - not exactly a whitewash for the National party, but that's how they took it - or the slew of court cases over the Maori Council's attempts to delay their asset-sales: again, not exactly adding up to a clean bill of health), I'd suggest that perhaps the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment might need to consider resignation if the point of the job is really to rubberstamp pre-formulated business decisions. Even she says our present government have "dropped the ball" on the environment ...

Oh, and by the way, the industrialists involved have informed us that there are "many errors" in the Gasland film:

Energy in Depth (EiD), launched by the Independent Petroleum Association of America, has created a web page with a list of claimed factual inaccuracies in the documentary, and produced an associated film titled TruthLand. In response to the EID's list of claimed factual inaccuracies, the Gasland website offers a rebuttal.

As so often on these occasions, it's the Defence position that causes more genuine disquiet than the Prosecution. All they appear to have been able to come up with is the statement that gas leaks from deposits hundreds of feet below couldn't possible have made their way up through so many impermeable strata to contaminate ground water - a claim now denied by a "2011 study by Duke University." Oh, and an extended rigmarole about the precise "distinction between biogenic and thermogenic gas." The film, it seems, confuses the two. However:

Dr. Anthony Ingraffea, D. C. Baum Professor of Engineering at Cornell University ... has said that drilling and hydraulic fracturing can liberate biogenic natural gas into a fresh water aquifer. That is, just because gas is biogenic does not necessarily indicate that it reached a well by natural means.

Obviously I can't venture any opinion on such technical matters, but if that's really the best they've got, against the compelling moonscapes of devastated horror exhibited by the film, then I have to conclude that we really are in trouble here.

So, sorry, our present inertia and tacit tolerance of fracking as somehow superior to stripmining or offshore oil drilling is no longer an acceptable position. This is actually something we might still be able to do something about. Writing to your MP (unless it's John Key), or - better still - to Dr. Jan Wright might be a good start, though.

So what if Straterra says that "fracking in New Zealand is nothing like how this technology is portrayed in Gasland"? What's next - an endorsement from Ken Ring? Don't you "industry spokespeople" understand that it simply isn't enough to say that the film hasn't proved every one of its devastating claims? The point is that if any of them are true, then it's time to stop.

This is not just our future, but our children's children's children's future. Some of the damage done now can never be undone. We have to know that it's safe before it's allowed to proceed. And - guess what? - I suspect that even our own "clean green" variety is going to turn out to be a colossal can of worms before we're through.

Why not Frack Farmland?

Ashes to Ashes: Geoffrey Ashe

[Geoffrey Ashe: All About King Arthur (1969 / 1973)]

One of the first books I ever bought off my own bat was Geoffrey Ashe's All About King Arthur (London: Carousel Books, 1973). The other titles in the series included such gems as "All About Football," "All About Money" and "All About Weather," so you can see that it already stood out as a bit of an anomaly. I must have been about eleven or twelve at the time, and I see from the back that it must have cost 95 cents - not an inconsiderable sum for me back then.

While I suppose that there's no really direct connection with strangely lyrical writer of erotica Aran Ashe, whom I blogged about in a post about different modes of narrative construction last year, one could perhaps argue that both Ashes inhabit a conceptual no-man's-land: in Aran's case, between abnormal psychology and straight pornography; in Geoffrey's, between no-nonsense archaeology and New Age claptrap.

There's no doubt, though, that Geoffrey is the easier to recommend of the two. His books are immensely entertaining, and even quite well written (especially the earlier ones). Nor is there any doubting his basic seriousness when it comes to weighing up stray pieces of evidence bearing on his own King Charles's head: the possible historicity of certain aspects of the Arthurian legend.

For a while after reading that book, King Arthur and the Arthurian Legend was everything to me: T. H. White's The Once and Future King, Mary Stewart's "Merlin" trilogy - you name it, if it had anything to do with King Arthur, I was for it.

The obsession abated after a while, but it left me with an abiding taste for the works of Geoffrey Ashe, author (as I gradually became aware) a whole slew of other titles on King Arthur and kindred subjects. In fact, so many have there come to be, that All About King Arthur has dropped off most of his bibliography lists.

Fair enough, really. It is, in retrospect, little more than a précis of parts of the argument of more "grown-up" books such as King Arthur’s Avalon: The Story of Glastonbury (1957) and From Caesar to Arthur (1960), not to mention the book of essays The Quest for Arthur’s Britain Ashe edited, with contributions by himself, Leslie Alcock, C. A Ralegh Radford, & Philip Rahtz (1968).

For me at the time, though, it was the door to a strange world of history-cum-romance, a realm bordering on full-on New Age works such as John Michell's The View over Atlantis (first published in that same year, 1969); but also with a strong dose of the dry-as-dust archaeological precision of Leslie Alcock's Arthur’s Britain: History and Archaeology, AD 367-634 (1971).

[Geoffrey Ashe: The Finger and the Moon (1973 / 2004)]

Even then it was a difficult path to tread, but - as I've continued to follow Ashe's career and publications over the years - it's one he's persevered in ever since: continuing to flirt with fringe history and even occultism, but still retaining a solid reputation for his more carefully researched historical works.

[Geoffrey Ashe: The Hell-Fire Clubs (2005)]

Here's a brief list of the Geoffrey Ashe books in my collection. It's more representative than comprehensive, but I think it will give you some idea of the breadth of his interests, and the somewhat disconcerting places those tastes have taken him at times:

[Geoffrey Ashe (1995)]

Geoffrey Ashe (1923- ):
Bibliography

1. King Arthur’s Avalon: The Story of Glastonbury. 1957. Fontana Books. London: Collins, 1973.


2. From Caesar to Arthur. London: Collins, 1960.


3. Land to the West: St Brendan’s Voyage to America. London: Collins, 1962.


4. [Ed., with Leslie Alcock, C. A Ralegh Radford, & Philip Rahtz]. The Quest for Arthur’s Britain. 1968. London: Paladin, 1973.


5. All About King Arthur. 1969. London: Carousel Books, 1973.


6. Camelot and the Vision of Albion. 1971. St. Albans, Herts: Panther, 1975.


7. The Finger and the Moon. 1973. St. Albans, Herts: Panther, 1975.


8. The Virgin. 1976. Paladin. Frogmore, St Albans, Herts: Granada Publishing Limited, 1977.


9. The Ancient Wisdom. 1977. Abacus. London: Sphere Books, 1979.


10. Avalonian Quest. 1982. London: Fontana Paperbacks, 1984.


11. [in association with Debrett’s Peerage]. The Discovery of King Arthur. London: Guild Publishing, 1985.


12. The Landscape of King Arthur. With Photographs by Simon McBride. London: Webb & Bower (Publishers) Limited, in association with Michael Joseph Limited, 1987.


13. Mythology of the British Isles. 1990. London: Methuen London, 1992.


14. Atlantis: Lost Lands, Ancient Wisdom. London: Thames & Hudson, 1992.

[Geoffrey Ashe: The Discovery of King Arthur (1985)]

I suppose, on the most basic level, an author has to make a living, and some subjects command better sales than others: notably, in the period in question, books of alternate history in what might be described as the Erich von Däniken mode. Ashe is certainly no von Däniken, but then he's not really a Simon Schama either.

All three could (loosely) be described as popular historians, but - while Geofrrey Ashe is clearly acquainted with archival research and the laws of evidence in a way that von Däniken and his ilk will never be - it's hard to imagine him being made welcome in a modern Academic History department, either. It depends on which university it's in, I suppose.

Books such as The Ancient Wisdom (1977) and Atlantis: Lost Lands, Ancient Wisdom (1992) were therefore a little disconcerting to me. He's always careful to hedge his bets, though: and New Age philosophies, particularly the genealogies they construct for certain of their trains of thought, are certainly a legitimate topic of research. At times the line between researcher and apologist seemed a trifle blurry, though.

Then there was his "discovery" of the identity of the "real" King Arthur, outlined in the appropriately named Discovery of King Arthur (1985). All one can say about this is that, though argued passionately and even quit convincingly by Ashe, it doesn't appear to have persuaded the majority of scholars of this period. I guess the jury is still out on that one.

[Geoffrey Ashe: The Mythology of the British Isles (1990)]

Where I think Ashe is at his best is in books such as his Mythology of the British Isles. This beautifully illustrated attempt to apply the layout and approach of Robert Graves's Greek Myths to a British context gives him scope to develop his idiosyncratic approach to the European Dark Ages. In an era whose records are (by turns) unreliable or non-existent, a more creative approach is needed to get anywhere near the approximate mind-set of - say - a fifth-century Briton. This Ashe can provide, and the book remains the perfect pendant to his more celebrated books about Glastonbury and the excavations at Cadbury Castle / Camelot.

Do I think that more people should read Geoffrey Ashe? Well, yes, absolutely. I don't say that you should swallow everything he argues, but the fact that he does argue for his hypotheses: carefully, and with close attention to what written and archaeological record there is puts him in a completely different category from other best-selling "alternative historians" such as the equally entertaining (but far less trustworthy) Graham Hancock.

[Geoffrey Ashe: Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age (2002)]

Somehow, in books such as Underworld: Flooded Kingdoms of the Ice Age (2002), the ruins turn out never to be accessible that day - whether it be a recent storm, or difficult tides, the dive has to be postponed, the evidence is not quite ready to hand. His books - cogently written thought some parts of them undoubtedly are - do not stand up to scrutiny. They tease rather than reveal.

Geoffrey Ashe is not like that. He means what he says, and he won't go beyond the borders of his evidence, however hard he strains at the leash sometimes. What's more, he has the gift of conveying something of the magic of the unknown, the conjectural ... I think I made a better choice than I knew that day back in the early 70s, when I bought that unassuming little book from that newly opened bookshop in Mairangi Bay.

[Ashes to Ashes (1980)]

Gibbonian Periods

Edward Gibbon: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Ed. David Womersley. Penguin Classics (1994)

Gibbon observes that in the Arabian book par excellence, in the Koran, there are no camels; I believe if there were any doubt as to the authenticity of the Koran, this absence of camels would be sufficient to prove it is an Arabian work.

- Jorge Luis Borges: "The Argentine Writer and Tradition"

What was my surprise, whilst trawling through the seemingly endless pages of volume 5 of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to find the following remark, squirreled away unobtrusively in a footnote?

... Mahomet himself, who was fond of milk, prefers the cow, and does not even mention the camel; but the diet of Mecca and Medina was already more luxurious ...

- Gibbon, vol. 5, chapter L, ftnt.13
[Penguin Classics ed., vol. III, p. 155]

What's most interesting is that this remark follows a long disquisition on horses ["Arabia, in the opinion of the naturalist, is the genuine and original country of the horse" (III: 154-55.)], and is not really concerned with the Koran and its contents at all (except in passing).

Did Borges get it wrong? He did have a tendency to exaggerate the significance of particular passages he'd found in the classics which seemed to vindicate some particularly outrageous paradox of his: witness his claims about the legendary "602nd Night" of the 1001 Nights, when Scheherazade - allegedly - starts to retell her own story (for more on that assertion, see my essay here).

Harem Nights

As in the case of Scheherazade, there's always a whisker of truth in what he says. After all, Mahomet could scarcely "not have mentioned" the camel anywhere except in the Koran, so Borges is teasing out an implication which is undoubtedly there in Gibbon's text - in however tenuous a form.

What else does Gibbon say in this memorable chapter 50 of the Decline and Fall, though? In the midst of a long discussion of Arabic culture, he suddenly gives vent to the following disavowal:

Their [the Arabs'] language and letters are copiously treated by Pocock ... and Niebuhr ... I pass slightly; I am not fond of repeating words like a parrot.

- Gibbon, vol. 5, chapter L, ftnt.39
[Penguin Classics ed., vol. III, p. 164]

It wasn't his field. He was at the mercy of his sources. And (unfortunately) on this occasion - as so often latterly, once he'd left the better-trodden field of the Greek and Roman classics - they led him astray. A simple search of an online version of the Koran gives us no fewer than 18 matches for the word "camel."

X marks the spot.
"It was here on the evening of the 15th October, 1764 that Edward Gibbon formed the idea of writing the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
More or less ..."

The first volume of Gibbon's masterwork appeared in 1776, on the eve of the American Revolution (or "War of Independence," if you prefer the British usage). The next instalment of two volumes came out in 1781, when that war had reached its climax. The last package of three volumes was published in 1788, on the eve of the French Revolution.

Gibbon's Enlightenment view of the 'settled" nature of modern times was thus continually overtaken by events. Is his book, then, too outdated, too invalidated by subsequent research and archaeology to be worth reading any more?

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. vol. 2 (1995)

One of the reviewers of David Womersley's magisterial 3-volume Penguin Classics edition remarked that - strangely enough - it was the supplementary notes and "corrections" of such Victorian scholars as J. B. Bury which read most archaically now. Gibbon himself, by contrast, seems to speak every more clearly over the more than two centuries that separate his work from us.

Bentinck Street, London

I first tried to read Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1977, shortly after buying all six volumes of the Everyman edition from Vintage Books in Elliott Street.

Elliott Street, Auckland (2010)

The shop (long since pulverised into dust: it was situated somewhere in the vicinity of the Atrium on Elliott mall, and though intact in my imagination, has now - literally - no earthly habitation) was one of my favourite haunts, and I still remember the day I walked in and saw the red and gold volumes sitting there, in a neat little row. The price was "$9 for 6," which seemed pretty reasonable even at the time.

I promptly scooped them up and took them to the from of the shop. At this stage, however, I was interrupted by a rather flustered gentleman who'd apparently been summoned by phone by the owners to look over this recently acquired set of books. "I've been looking for it for years," he exclaimed, in an appeal to my better nature.

"So have I," I replied, and continued my inexorable progress to the till. I still feel guilty about that, I must admit. He must have seen me as some jumped-up interloper, heading him off at the moment of consummation of the quest of a lifetime. And yet I had been looking for it for years - a complete set of Gibbon was high on my list of most desirable books (along with an unabridged Arabian Nights and the collected works of William Morris) ...

Right was undoubtedly on my side, and yet I can still hear that plaintive voice in my ear. Every time I ran across another second-hand set of that or other editions of Gibbon, I thought of him, and hoped that he'd run across another copy without too much delay. In any case, I bought it, took it home, and - impelled as much by guilt as interest, perhaps - started to read it.

Edward Gibbon: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Ed. Oliphant Smeaton. Everyman's Library. 6 vols (1910)

(As you can see, I used to brand my books with that rather barbarous rubber stamp back then, but it's still quite interesting to see the dates.)

Anyway, to make a long story short, I think I got to the end of volume one before I gave up. The sheer sweep and extent of Gibbon's historical imagination was beyond me, and I just bogged down each time I tried to get going on volume two. I did, however, enjoy reading the standard edition of his autobiography, which I picked up a couple of years later.

Edward Gibbon: Autobiography
Ed. Lord Sheffield. The World's Classics (1907)

In Edinburgh, in the late 1980s, I knew a young American who'd made a fortune on the Stock Exchange, then retired to pursue a more worthy life of scholarship and reflection (though he did have a bad habit of trying to hit on each of the female students in the class one after the other). Like me, he was called Jack, and we became friends of a sort. The main focus of his studies was Gibbon, and he would endlessly extol the beauty and complexity of the Decline and Fall. "Have you read the whole thing?" I asked him one day (somewhat naively, in retrospect).

He stared at me incredulously. "Are you joking? It's huge. No, I'm just reading the passages that my supervisor [a certain Mr. Geoffrey Carnall, if I remember rightly] recommends to me."

So much for the other Jack's scholarship. Not that I could claim any better. Our acquaintance eventually foundered over a rather bizarre graduation lunch party he hosted, where he asked me - as a kind of concession to his fetish for all things old and musty and imperial - to make the "loyal toast" to the reigning sovereign. None of the Brits present had been ready to oblige, but I felt, given that Elizabeth II was titular head of state for NZ as well the UK, that I could do so without any great abridgement of conscience.

Mr Carnall, who was present (and, it turned out, a devout Quaker) was grievously shocked and offended, and I must confess that I've often regretted since indulging Jack's seemingly harmless request. Symbols are realer than they seem, I learned that day, and I've been careful not to bow down too assiduously in the House of Rimmon ever since.

A subsequent attempt to read Gibbon in the late nineties took me as far as the fourth volume of the Everyman edition, where I got snared in the intricacies of Justinian's legal and religious institutions (the account of which seemed to have dominated most of the volume).

Then came David Womersley's great Penguin edition:

Edward Gibbon: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Ed. David Womersley. Penguin Classics. vol 1 of 3 (1994).

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794)


1. Gibbon, Edward. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Ed. Oliphant Smeaton. 6 vols. Everyman’s Library. 1910. London: J. M. Dent / New York: E. P. Dutton, 1928.


2. Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Volume the First (1776) and Volume the Second (1781). Ed. David Womersley. 1994. Penguin Classics. 1995. Rev. ed. Vol 1 of 3. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005.


3. Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Volume the Third (1781) and Volume the Fourth (1788). Ed. David Womersley. 1994. Penguin Classics. Vol 2 of 3. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.


4. Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire: Volume the Fifth (1788) and Volume the Sixth (1788). Ed. David Womersley. 1994. Penguin Classics. Vol 3 of 3. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995.


5. Gibbon, Edward. Autobiography. Ed. Lord Sheffield. Introduction by J. B. Bury. The World’s Classics. London: Henry Frowde / Oxford University Press, 1907.


6. Gibbon, Edward. Gibbon’s Journey from Geneva to Rome: His Journal from 20 April to 2 October 1764. Ed. Georges A. Bonnard. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1961.

The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. vol. 1 (1995)

I'm therefore glad to report, after 35 years (1977-2013), that I've finally succeeded in reaching the end of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788). And what have I learned from the experience?

Well, he certainly does have a down on the Byzantine empire (early and late). I've never read a more sympathetic account of the notorious Fourth Crusade, when the Venetians devoted a mob of French and Germans bound for Palestine into attacking their fellow-Christians in Constantinople instead.

He's very interesting on Mahomet and the rise of Islam; surprisingly well-informed on Attila and Genghis Khan and Tamurlane and other great invaders from the East. He also gets in some amusing side-swipes at Voltaire and Dr. Johnson, both of whom seem to have offended him at various times.

Beyond that, though, all I can say is that if you have the slightest curiosity in how Western civilisation went from Marcus Aurelius to Pope Alessandro Borgia, with extensive divagations down every interesting byway in the history of over a thousand years, then Gibbon is your man. More than that: Womersley's is your edition. The true nature of Gibbon's work comes into focus there, freed of the accretions of nineteenth and twentieth-century commentators and improvers - and complete with his fascinating Vindication of the accuracy of his chapters on the early church, which caused such controversy with Ecclesiastical historians then and since.

And how else will you ever be able to check the accuracy of statements such as Borges's about Gibbon's view on the presence or absence of camels from the Koran? I've seen it quoted everywhere, but nobody else has bothered to check it (so far as I know, at any rate) ...

Sir Joshua Reynolds: Edward Emily Gibbon