We all used to be something else, and we will all be something new again in the worlds to come.

Written in an effort to ward off existential dread, and to find new understandings and consolations for those similarly afflicted, The Chthonic Cycle is an eccentric and brilliantly curated tour through time, in which fascinating objects glint and spark and the transience of humanity flickers.

Extracted from The Chthonic Cycle by Una Cruickshank. RRP 35.00. Published by Te Herenga Waka University Press (November 2024).

Excerpt from essay ‘Waste’

It’s difficult to hold in your mind’s eye the size of a sperm whale; people often resort to describing them in terms of industrial products like cars or buses. The largest males can measure 20 metres—which is about the length of an 18-wheel truck—and weigh 54,000 kilograms. Females are much smaller, but still spectacular; like humans, they can live more than 70 years if they don’t meet with an accident or violence.

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Sperm whales require about a tonne of food per day to power their enormous bodies. They dive from the surface world of sunlight, birds and men, down into the mesopelagic or twilight zone, where there’s almost no light and the pressure on their bodies is so extreme that their lungs are compressed like squeezed accordion bellows. A feeding sperm whale is a holy terror of appetite, a vast mouth tearing through all in its powerful downward path. Most of the creatures that live in the mesopelagic zone are cephalopods (squids, octopuses), and the unfussy sperm whale swallows them whole. Some whales wear visible scars from doing battle with large prey, including giant squid; about 1% will suffer the cephalopod’s revenge internally. There are three hard, indigestible parts to a squid’s soft and delicious body: the beak, the eye lenses, and an internal organ called the pen or the quill. Occasionally these get stuck and become an irritant in the whale’s intestinal lining, very slowly accreting layer upon layer of mucus, backed-up faeces and squid parts until it forms a coprolith—a stone made of shit. Eventually, the whale either passes the blockage or dies of an intestinal rupture; the result is ambergris, and it’s ‘worth’ between 10,000 and 14,000 euros per kilogram.

Ambergris is often described as whale vomit, but this is a misunderstanding, or prudishness, or wishful thinking. It’s always been a confounding substance, a luxury in search of a purpose. Even the name reflects a history of uncertainty about what it really is. The Arabic name for ambergris, anbar, was diverted through French and
split in two to produce amber gris and amber jaune: grey amber and yellow amber. Sharing certain qualities—both ambergris and amber were found on beaches after storms, and both made a fine incense—they were commonly assumed to be very similar substances, if not exactly the same. Several medieval Muslim scholars
theorised that ambergris spouted up from underwater fountains or springs, and in later centuries some Europeans adopted this belief. A Chinese writer in the mid-13th century, Chao Ju-kua, stated that ambergris was the hardened drool of dragons who slept on rocks in certain seas. Other writers guessed it was plant material, droppings from large seabirds, a fungus, an undersea fruit, bitumen, pitch, sea foam, or whale dung, sperm or vomit.

But the world’s few modern experts are now unanimous: ambergris is sperm whale shit. The oceanographer Robert Clarke uses the vivid term ‘faecal concretion’, which is both deliciously alliterative and nastily tangible.

Its primary use today is as a fixative for perfumes. Chanel No. 5 and Shalimar by Guerlain contain ambergris, as do certain small batch and custom perfumes available only to the fashionable rich. A modern recreation of Marie Antoinette’s perfume, Sillage de la Reine, contained ambergris, per the original formula, and sold at US$500 per 25 grams. Those perfumers willing to speak on the record agree that the animalic note of real ambergris is essential. Artificial replicas like Ambermor, Cetalox, Synambrane and Ambrox, though molecularly correct, will not do. The smell of luxury is, on a near subconscious level, the smell of shit.

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King Charles II liked to eat ambergris with eggs. Suleiman the Magnificent drank it in his coffee. It long enjoyed a reputation as an aphrodisiac and also as a highly effective all-purpose medicine. However, it’s the unique smell of ambergris that has exerted the longest-lasting fascination. When freshly expelled, whether from a live whale or a decomposing one, ambergris is viscous, black, heavy and foul-smelling. To become valuable—almost literally worth its weight in gold, depending on the market and the quality of the lump—it needs to age like an oceanic cheese. Having risen to the surface, it will float for months or years, moving with the currents. Perhaps it finds its way into a near-freezing subpolar gyre, or gets drawn into the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for a circuit. The salt water and harsh sunlight oxidise and degrade it, gradually transforming it into a greyish lump of matter that looks like heavy pumice and has an odour unlike anything else. It has been compared to fine tobacco, the wood of an old church, sandalwood, the tide, freshly turned earth, seaweed drying in the sun, Brazil nuts, ferns, newly mowed hay, cow dung, violets, old musk, a grandmother’s perfume, furniture polish, leaf litter, mushrooms, grass, vanilla, mulch, pine, rubbing alcohol without the sharpness. If carefully preserved, a piece of ambergris can retain its scent for 300 years.

The Chthonic Cycle is available in all good bookstores now.