He woke us when the dawn was the very faintest lightening of the eastern horizon. Breakfasted on dried figs and slivers of dried camel meat. We rode before the great heat began.
At midday Chen said, There it is.
He was pointing east, towards where I guess the very center of the Karamakan desert to be. Hassall and I screwed up our eyes, shaded them from the sun, peered into the dazzle, and saw nothing.
It is the afternoon now, the hottest part of the day, and we are resting. Hassall rigged up a rough shelter using a couple of blankets to throw a morsel of shade where we all lay, Chen too, and slept a little. No dreams. The camels fold their legs, close their eyes, and doze impassively.
The pain has diminished, as Chen said it would, but there is still a heart-deep wound—a perpetual drag of anguish. Will it ever end?
Karamakan, 27 September, evening
Traveling again. Writing this on camelback. Chen no longer sure of direction. Asked where, he replies, Further. More way to go, but is vague about which way that is. He hasn’t seen it since yesterday. When asked, he can’t say what exactly he saw. I assume the red building, but H and I have seen no sign of it, or of any color except the interminable and almost unbearable monotony of sand.
Impossible to estimate the distance we’ve traveled. Not many kilometers; another day should surely find us at the center of this desolate place.
Karamakan, 28 September
A better night, thank God. Dreams complex and confused but less bloody. Slept deeply till Chen woke us before dawn.
Now we can see it. At first it was like a mirage, flickering, wavering, floating above the horizon. Then it seemed to grow a base and to be attached firmly to the earth. Now it is solidly and unmistakably there—a building like a fortress or a hangar for a vast airship. No details visible at this distance, no doors, windows, fortifications, nothing. Just a large rectangular block, dark red in color. Writing this just after midday, before we crawl under H’s shelter and rest during the godawful heat. When we awake, the last lap.
Karamakan, 28 September, evening
We have come to the building and met the priests/soldiers/guards. They seem like all of those things. Unarmed, but powerfully built and threatening of aspect. To the eye they look neither Western European nor Chinese, nor Tartar nor Muscovite; pale skin, black hair, round eyes; perhaps more Persian than anything else. They don’t speak English—at least they ignored us when Hassall and I tried to speak to them—but Chen communicates immediately in what I think is Tajik. They are dressed in simple smocks and loose trousers of dark red cotton, the same color as the building, and leather sandals. They seem to have no dæmons, but Hassall and I are beyond being frightened by that now.
We asked through Chen if we could enter the building. An immediate and absolute no. We asked what goes on in there. They conferred, then answered with a refusal to tell us. After more questions, all unhelpfully answered, we got a hint when one of them, more voluble than the rest, spoke rapidly to Chen for a full minute. In the torrent of his speech, Hassall and I both made out, several times, the word gül, which means rose in many languages of Central Asia. Chen looked at us several times during the man’s speech, but when it was over, he would only say, No good. Not stay here. No good.
What did he say about roses? we asked. Chen just shook his head.
Did he mention roses?
No. No good. Must go now.
The guards were watching us closely, looking from us to Chen, from him back to us.
Then I thought to try something else. Knowing that parts of Central Asia had been traveled by the Romans, I wondered whether anything of their language had remained. I said in Latin: We intend no harm to you or your people. May we know what you are guarding in this place?
Immediate recognition and understanding. The voluble one replied at once in the same language: What have you brought as payment?
I said, We did not know payment was necessary. We are anxious because our friends have disappeared. We think they might have come here. Have you seen any travelers like us?
We have seen many travelers. If they come akterrakeh, and they have payment, they can enter. One way only, not so. But if they enter, they may not leave.
Then can you tell us whether our friends are inside that red building?
In answer to which he said, If they are here, they are not there, and if they are there, they are not here.
It sounded like a formula, a standard form of words that had been repeated so often its meaning had worn away. At least that told me that others had asked similar questions. I tried another.
I said, You spoke of payment. Did you mean in exchange for roses?
What else?
Knowledge, perhaps.
Our knowledge is not for you.
What payment would be satisfactory?
A life, was the disconcerting answer.
One of us must die?
We will all die.
That was little help, of course. I tried another question. Why can we not grow your roses outside this desert?
The only answer that received was a look of scorn. Then he walked away.
I said to Chen, Do you know of anyone who has gone inside?
He said, One man. He did not return. No one returns.
Frustrated, Hassall and I retreated to our little shelter and discussed what to do. It was a fruitless, painful, repetitious discussion. We were hedged in by imperatives: it’s absolutely necessary to investigate these roses; it’s absolutely impossible to do so without going in and never returning.
So we examined it again more deeply. Why is it necessary to investigate the roses? Because of what they show us about the nature of Dust. And if the Magisterium hears about what is here in Karamakan, they will stop at nothing to prevent that knowledge from spreading, and to do that, they will come here and destroy the red building and everything in it; and they have armies and armaments in plenty to do that. The recent trouble in Khulanshan and Akdzhar is their work—no doubt about that. They are coming closer.
So we must investigate, and the inevitable consequence of that is that one of us must go in and the other must return with the knowledge we have gained so far. There’s no alternative, none. And we cannot do it.
There is still no sign of our dæmons, and our store of food and water is diminishing. We can’t stay here much longer.
A note at the end, in a different hand, said:
Later that night Strauss’s Cariad arrived. She was exhausted, fearful, damaged. Next day she and Strauss went inside the red building, and I returned with Chen. Trouble coming closer. Ted Cartwright and I agreed that I should set off at once with what little knowledge we have. Pray God I find Strella, and that she will forgive me. R.H.
Lyra put the pages on the table. She felt light-headed. She felt as if she’d caught a glimpse of a long-lost memory, something intensely important that was buried under thousands of days of ordinary life. What was it that had affected her so much? The red building—the desert around it—the guards who spoke in Latin—something buried so deeply that she couldn’t be sure if it was true, or a dream, or a memory of a dream, or even of a story she’d loved so much when she was a little child that she’d insisted on it again and again at bedtime, and then put away and forgotten entirely. She knew something about that red building in the desert. And she had no idea what it was.
Pan was curled up on the table, asleep, or pretending. She knew why. Dr. Strauss’s description of separating from his dæmon, Cariad, had brought back immediately that abominable betrayal of her own on the shores of the world of the dead, when she had abandoned Pan to go in search of the ghost of her friend Roger. The guilt and the shame would still be as fresh in her heart on the day she died, no matter how far away that was.
Perhaps that wound was one reason they
were estranged now. It had never healed. There was no one else alive to whom she could talk about it, except for Serafina Pekkala, the witch queen; but witches were different, and anyway she hadn’t seen Serafina since that journey to the Arctic so many years before.
Oh, but…
“Pan?” she whispered.
He gave no sign that he’d heard. He seemed to be fast asleep, except that she knew he wasn’t.
“Pan,” she went on, still whispering, “what you said about the man who was killed…The man this diary’s about, Hassall…He and his dæmon could separate, isn’t that what you said?”
Silence.
“He must have found her again when he came out of that desert, Karamakan….That must be a place like the one the witches go to when they’re young, where their dæmons can’t go. So maybe there are other people…”
He didn’t move; he didn’t speak.
She looked away wearily. But her eye was caught by something on the floor by the bookcase: it was the book she’d used to prop the window open, the one Pan had thrown down in distaste. Hadn’t she put it back on the shelf? He must have thrown it down again.
She got up to replace it, and Pan saw her and said, “Why don’t you get rid of that rubbish?”
“Because it’s not rubbish. I wish you wouldn’t throw it about like a spoilt child just because you don’t like it.”
“It’s poison, and it’s destroying you.”
“Oh, grow up.”
She laid it on the desk, and he sprang down to the floor, his fur bristling. His tail swept back and forth across the carpet as he sat and stared at her. He was radiating contempt, and she flinched a little but kept her hands on the book.
They said not another word as she went to bed. He slept in the armchair.
She couldn’t sleep for thinking of the journal, and the meaning of the word akterrakeh. It meant something to do with the journey to the red building, and possibly something to do with separating, but she was so tired that none of it made sense. The man who’d been murdered was able to separate, and it seemed from what Dr. Strauss had written that no one could make the journey if they were intact. Was akterrakeh a word in one of the local languages for separation?
The best way to think about it would have been by talking with Pan. But he was unreachable. Reading about the separation of the two men from Tashbulak upset him, angered him, frightened him—perhaps all of those things—just as it did her, but then there’d come the distraction of the novel that he hated so much. There were so many things they had to disagree about, and that book was one of the most toxic.
The Hyperchorasmians, by a German philosopher called Gottfried Brande, was a novel that was having an extraordinary vogue among clever young people all over Europe and beyond. It was a publishing phenomenon: nine hundred pages long, with an unpronounceable title (at least until Lyra had learnt to pronounce the ch as a k), an uncompromising sternness of style, and nothing that could remotely pass for a love interest, it had sold in the millions and influenced the thinking of an entire generation. It told the story of a young man who set out to kill God, and succeeded. But the unusual thing about it, the quality that had set it apart from anything else Lyra had ever read, was that in the world Brande described, human beings had no dæmons. They were totally alone.
Like many others, Lyra had been spellbound, hypnotized by the force of the story, and found her head ringing with the hammer blows of the protagonist’s denunciation of anything and everything that stood in the way of pure reason. Even his quest to find God and kill him was expressed in terms of the fiercest rationality: it was irrational that such a being should exist, and rational to do away with him. Of figurative language, of metaphor or simile, there was not a trace. At the end of the novel, as the hero looked out from the mountains at a sunrise, which in the hands of another writer might have represented the dawn of a new age of enlightenment, free of superstition and darkness, the narrator turned away from commonplace symbolism of that kind with scorn. The final sentence read, “It was nothing more than what it was.”
That phrase was a sort of touchstone of progressive thinking among Lyra’s peers. It had become fashionable to disparage any sort of excessive emotional reaction, or any attempt to read other meanings into something that happened, or any argument that couldn’t be justified with logic: “It’s nothing more than what it is.” Lyra herself had used the phrase more than once in conversation, and felt Pan turn away in disdain as she did so.
When they woke up the morning after reading Dr. Strauss’s journal, their disagreement about The Hyperchorasmians was still alive and bitter. As Lyra dressed, she said, “Pan, what’s got into you this past year? You never used to be like this. We never used to be like this. We used to disagree about things without this monumental everlasting sulk—”
“Can’t you see what it’s doing to you, this attitude you’re affecting?” he burst in. He was standing on top of the bookcase.
“What attitude? What are you talking about?”
“That man’s influence is baleful. Haven’t you seen what’s happening to Camilla? Or that boy from Balliol—what’s his name, Guy something? Since they started reading The Hypercolonics or whatever it’s called, they’ve become arrogant and unpleasant in all kinds of ways. Ignoring their dæmons, as if they didn’t exist. And I can see it in you too. A sort of absolutism—”
“What? You’re not making sense at all. You refuse to know anything about it, but you think you have the right to criticize—”
“Not the right, the responsibility! Lyra, you’re closing your mind. Of course I know about the bloody book. I know exactly what you know. Actually, I probably know more, because I didn’t shut down my common sense, or my sense of what’s right, or something, while you were reading it.”
“You’re still fretting because his story does away with dæmons?”
He glared at her and then leapt down to the desk again. She moved back. Sometimes she was very conscious of how sharp his teeth were.
“What are you going to do?” she said. “Bite me till I agree?”
“Can’t you see?” he said again.
“I can see a book I think is extremely powerful and intellectually compelling. I can understand the appeal of reason, rationality, logic. No—not the appeal—I’m persuaded by them. It’s not an emotional spasm. It’s entirely a matter of rational—”
“Anything emotional has to be a spasm, has it?”
“The way you’re behaving—”
“No, you’re not listening to me, Lyra. I don’t think we’ve got anything in common anymore. I just can’t stand watching you turn into this rancorous, reductive monster of cold logic. You’re changing, that’s the point. I don’t like it. Damn it, we used to warn each other about this sort of—”
“And you think it’s all the fault of one novel?”
“No. It’s the fault of that Talbot man too. He’s just as bad, in a cowardly sort of way.”
“Talbot? Simon Talbot? Make your bloody mind up, Pan. There couldn’t be two more different thinkers. Complete opposites. According to Talbot, there’s no truth at all. Brande—”
“You didn’t see that chapter in The Constant Deceiver?”
“What chapter?”
“The one I had to suffer you reading through last week. Evidently you didn’t take it in, though I had to. The one where he pretends that dæmons are merely—what is it?—psychological projections with no independent reality. That one. All argued very prettily, charming, elegant prose, witty, full of brilliant paradoxes. You know the one I mean.”
“But you haven’t got any independent reality. You know that. If I died—”
“Neither have you, you stupid cow. If I died, so would you. Touché.”
She turned away, too angry to speak.
Simon Talbot was an Oxford philosopher whose latest book was
much discussed in the university. Whereas The Hyperchorasmians was a popular success that was dismissed as tosh by critics and read mainly by the young, The Constant Deceiver was a favorite among literary experts, who praised its elegance of style and playful wit. Talbot was a radical skeptic, to whom truth and even reality were rainbow-like epiphenomena with no ultimate meaning. In the silvery charm of his prose, everything solid flowed and ran and broke apart like mercury spilled from a barometer.
“No,” said Pan. “They’re not different. Two sides of the same coin.”
“Just because of what they say about dæmons—or don’t say—they don’t pay you enough tribute—”
“Lyra, I wish you could hear yourself. Something’s happened to you. You’re under a spell or something. These men are dangerous—”
“Superstition,” she said, and she truly felt contempt for Pan just then, and hated herself for it, and couldn’t stop. “You can’t look at anything calmly and dispassionately. You have to throw insults at it. It’s childish, Pan. Attributing some kind of evil or magic to an argument you can’t counter—you used to believe in seeing things clearly, and now you’re all bound up in fog and superstition and magic. Afraid of something because you can’t understand it.”
“I understand it perfectly. The trouble is that you don’t. You think those two charlatans are profound philosophers. You’re hypnotized by them. You read the absolute drivel they write, both of them, and you think it’s the latest thing in intellectual achievement. They’re lying, Lyra, both lying. Talbot thinks he can make truth disappear by waving his paradoxes around. Brande thinks he can do it just by bullheaded denial. You know what I think’s at the bottom of this infatuation of yours?”
“There you go again, describing something that doesn’t exist. But go on, say what you want to.”
“It’s not just a position you’re taking up. You half believe those people, that German philosopher and the other man. That’s what it is. You’re clever enough on top, but underneath you’re so bloody naive that you half believe their lies are true.”
The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust, Volume 2) Page 7