Masters of Atlantis

by Charles Portis

  “Look, sir, a picture of Mount Whitney. Isn’t that a magnificent sight? It gladdens the heart.”

  “Yes. The snow. On top.”

  “Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t believe we have any eminence in Indiana much higher than a thousand feet.”

  “Yes, I think you can say that nature presents a more formidable face in California. But you know, Austin, I sometimes think if I could just talk to Sydney man to man for a few—”

  Popper took the book from Mr. Jimmerson’s hands and flung it into the fire. “Excuse me, sir, that was very rude, I know, but I can’t sit here and let you torment yourself with that poison.”

  “You might at least have—”

  “Listen to me, sir. Hen and his ravings and his Mexican concentration camp—this is just a piddling episode in the vast time scale of Gnomonism. The man’s a mayfly, the fluttering creature of an hour. Why should we take any notice of him? He works in sun-dried bricks. We are building in marble with Pletho. Now I want you to put Hen out of your mind. Will you do that for me?”

  They looked into the blaze and waited silently for the flash point. The book covers writhed and then burst into yellow flames. “There. A fitting end for trash.”

  It was not Popper’s way to interrupt the Master or snatch objects from his hand but on this night he was tense. He was leaving the Temple the next day, leaving Burnette, pulling stakes, in circumstances that did not allow him to say goodbye. Over the past few months he had conferred often with Golescu in Washington via telephone. Their plans had been carefully laid and on this very night the professor was approaching Chicago by rail. Popper was to join him the next morning at Union Station and from there they would travel west together.

  The trip had been delayed over and over again because of Golescu’s difficulty in settling on an auspicious date for leaving his job and making a journey and undertaking a new enterprise. Popper himself was not so particular as to the alignment of the planets. He had a problem with the U.S. Selective Service, and it was one of growing urgency. He had never registered for the draft and had been lying low, in the Temple, since the Washington trip. Then, an informer, one of Hen’s men, turned his name in to the local draft board. A series of notices and summonses were sent to Popper, with little result, and his secretary, a dull girl, unwittingly aggravated the situation.

  Popper had instructed her to answer all unknown correspondents with a Gnomon leaflet and a photograph of himself on which he had written: THANKS A MILLION, AUSTIN POPPER. This was faithfully done. The draft board, in response to its letters and telegrams, had received five or six of these autographed pictures before turning the matter over to the G-men.

  But when these officers finally arrived at the Temple with a warrant, Popper had been gone for almost a week, leaving behind him an enormous telephone bill and a note to Mr. Jimmerson saying that Laura had taken a turn for the worse and that he was racing to her bedside in San Francisco.

  Mr. Jimmerson was bewildered. He read the note several times and turned it over to look for help on the blank side. Who was Laura? He had never heard Austin speak of a sweetheart or sister or any other dear one of that name, sick or well.

  He showed the note to one of the federal agents, a hefty young man who seemed familiar but whom he could not place. He did not recognize Pharris White, still neckless but trimmed down a bit and wearing a tan fedora. White was now in the FBI, which had become something of a haven for lawyers seeking to avoid military service. He shook the warrant in Mr. Jimmerson’s face. “I mean to serve this personally,” he said. “If you’re holding out on me, Jimmerson, I’ll put you away in a cell with Popper. Nothing would please me more. This Master of Gnomons business doesn’t cut any ice with me. Did you ever hear of misprision of a felony? Accessory after the fact? Here, I want to see that cap.” He examined the Poma with rough disdain and even placed it clownishly atop his own head. The agent in charge of the raid spoke sharply to him about these unprofessional antics and made him return it.

  Mr. Jimmerson said he was confident that he would hear from Austin in the next few days. The draft evasion matter could only be a misunderstanding. A telephone call to the Navy Department would clear it up at once. From Popper’s secretary the agents learned that Popper had been singing and humming snatches of California songs in recent weeks.

  Thus there were signs in abundance pointing to the Golden State, Popper believing that one could not lay it on too thickly, and it was there that the search for him was foolishly pressed.

  POPPER AND GOLESCU stepped off the Burlington Zephyr in Denver, well short of San Francisco, and then took a bus to the old mining town of Hogandale, Colorado, high in the mountains, at the headwaters of the Rio Puerco, known locally as the Pig River or Nasty River. Popper carried one suitcase and a perforated box with Squanto in it. Golescu had a good deal of luggage, including two sacks of dried mud. Wasting no time, they rented a derelict house at the foot of the sloping main street of Hogandale and went to work.

  It was a hard winter for the two city men, neither of whom had ever handled an axe or shovel. At night they tramped through the snow to the abandoned gold mines and collected buckets of dirt. The frozen ground was utterly lifeless, a mineral waste, but Golescu had the European notion that the back country of America was alive with snakes and scorpions and so took great care where he placed his feet. Popper assured him that these vermin were asleep. The real menace to the hikers of America, he said, was the rusty nail. Boards bearing these upright nails were lying about everywhere. Puncture your foot on one and within an hour your jaw would be locked firmly shut, never again to open, and you would be raving with brain fever. Golescu minced his steps with even greater care. By day the two men chopped wood and stoked the iron stoves and tended their potted plants.

  The professor had brought with him a plentiful supply of seeds and cuttings. Soon every windowsill in the old two-story frame house was crowded with pots and makeshift receptacles, from each of which sprouted a spiky green shaft. The pots were tagged by number. A log was kept for each one. There was detailed information as to the different potting soils—the fertilizer content, the acid-alkali balance and, most important of all, the origin of the soil, the mine it came from, whether the Perkins Drift, the Old Woman No. 2 or the Black Dog. In addition, there were control pots, some containing pure sand and others gold-free mud from the banks of the Potomac in Washington.

  This plant that was the focus of all their attention was creeping bagweed, or Blovius reptans, a mat-forming vine found growing rank in England and Europe along roadsides and in ditches and untended lots. The pinnate leaves of bagweed were alternately evergreen and deciduous, so that while some leaves were shed over the year, the vine was never barren of greenery. In this respect it was like the magnolia tree and the live oak. Bagweed, which had a way of choking out other vegetation, was universally despised by gardeners. Live stock refused to eat it. Even goats turned away from it. Bugs and worms gave it a wide berth. Bagweed had little decorative value, and despite the strong camphor smell given off by the bags or pods, it had never found a place in folk medicine. Apparently unremarkable, then, except for its hardiness and seeming uselessness, creeping bagweed did have one redeeming quality, and this was nothing less than the power to deposit gold in its leaf cells. To be sure, the gold appeared in only microscopic traces, but it was gold nonetheless, and gold that was easily recovered and of an elemental purity.

  Professor Golescu had hit on the bagweed discovery, or rediscovery, after piecing together clues found here and there in hundreds of books on alchemy, most notably in the works of Theophilus the Monk and Dr. John Dee. The revelation came in stages. For years he had prowled the library stacks and bookstalls of Bucharest, avid from his youth to lift the veil and know all. As early as 1934 he had broken through certain allusive writings to learn that gold might be taken from the leaves of a common flowering plant.

  Identifying the leaves, however, was another matter, and to this problem he finally ha
d to apply the tedious method of systematic exhaustion. He planted at least one specimen of every genus offered in the colorful seed catalogues of England and Holland. He crushed and processed thousands of leaves, using cyanide and zinc shavings as extractives, and in the end he always came up with the same mess of black sludge, but never any gold.

  Then in the summer of 1940, while he was in London waiting for his American visa to be forged, it struck him suddenly that the plant might be one not cultivated by man, some nuisance growth, and he went out into the countryside and gathered seeds from a variety of nettles, thistles, dandelions, nipplewort, chickweed, bagweed and other coarse vegetation. He resumed his experiments at his boardinghouse in Washington, and two years later, in the spring of 1942, he first saw the tiny points of gold precipitating on the zinc flakes. He drew his head back from the spectacle with a start. The jeweler’s loupe dropped from his eye. “So. And I am not expecting you from this stinkweed.”

  Golescu regarded other men with contempt. They were so many dim background figures in the central drama of the world, which was the life of Cezar Golescu, and he took no interest in them except as they might be able to alter the course of the drama, whether to aid him or thwart him. He enjoyed dazzling them with a show of learning now and then, but there were so many things they were unworthy of knowing or incapable of understanding, and these things he kept locked away in his head. Of his gold research he spoke not a word to any person in Europe or America until the chance meeting with Popper.

  Popper’s presence had something to do with it; men naturally confided in him and sought his approval. Even Golescu was not immune. He found himself boasting to this stranger and blurting out things. But there was more to it than that. He was concerned as to how he might best exploit his discovery and had decided that what he needed was an American business partner who knew the ground. Popper’s intelligence was, of course, of a lower order than his own—so much the better for control purposes—but Popper was clearly a man of affairs, with that lupine glint in his eye that suggested he would usually be at the forefront of any scramble for a prize.

  The thing that tipped the scales was Gnomonism. One of the few secret orders that Golescu had not been able to penetrate was the Gnomon Society, his difficulty being that he had never found a Gnomon until Popper came along. Did the organization even exist? Was there anything in it? He took pride in his Masonic degree, for he knew that his white linen apron was more ancient than the Golden Fleece or Roman Eagle, and more honorable than the Star or Garter, but so many of these brotherhoods had let him down with their grandiose claims and paltry secrets. Still, one could not give up the quest. Much ancient wisdom lay hidden, even from Golescu—the arts of Mu, the Alkahest formula, the elixir vitae—and it was his mission to search it out.

  Perhaps the Gnomons did know something. In any case, the hand of fate was evident in that first encounter with Popper at the Observatory. It was a day on which the moon was in crescent, signifying increase. Popper had loomed up before him quite suddenly, like some figure in an oriental tale, identifying himself not only as a Gnomon but as Cupbearer Royal to the Master himself. He had spoken well, saying, “I don’t know your name, sir, or what your work is, but I can see that you are a man of exceptional powers. I saw it from thirty yards away.”

  And Popper had quickly proven himself worthy of the professor’s confidence, seizing on the bagweed discovery to show how it might be turned to account. If the weed produced a little gold out of indifferent soil, he reasoned, then why should it not produce a great deal of gold when planted in soil known to be auriferous? The idea had somehow not occurred to Golescu and he was stunned by what he saw as a brilliant leap. Two heads were indeed better than one, if the other one was Popper’s.

  Their plan took form. Popper called it Banco Plan. They would go to abandoned gold mines in the West and surreptitiously test the soil. When they had located the most productive property they would lease it as cheap grazing land and plant it in bagweed. Entire mountain ranges would be covered with a carpet of creeping bagweed. Nature would do most of their work and no stamping mills or monstrous smelters would be needed—only a leaf chopper, a few vats and some cheap chemicals. Within a year or two they would be sitting atop tons of gold, which they would sell off in measured driblets, in the way of the South African diamond kings, so as not to swamp the market.

  By way of a cover story, Popper introduced himself to the citizens of Hogandale as Commander DeWitt Farnsworth of Naval Intelligence, lately wounded in the Philippines. He affected a limp and wore a soft black hat and Lincolnesque shawl. He had come to the mountains to convalesce in the sparkling air, as well as to help his refugee friend, Dr. Omar Baroody, with his sticky experiments in weed saps, from which he hoped to develop a new kind of rubber, so desperately needed in the war effort. Herr Hitler and General Tojo would give a good deal to know Dr. Baroody’s location.

  As it turned out, no one in Hogandale cared. The fifty or so inhabitants were a dispirited lot of nesters and stragglers who had been beaten down by life. Brooding as they were, constantly, over their own humiliations, defeats, wrecked hopes, withered crops, thoughtless children and lost opportunities, they had no curiosity at all about the two strange men who had rented the old Taggert house at the bottom of the hill.

  After a few weeks Popper no longer bothered with the false names or the limp, though he did continue to use the walking stick. He felt safe. They were not likely to be found out here, marooned in pelagic America, far from any shipping lanes and with no smudge of smoke on the horizon.

  For security reasons Golescu would allow no strangers in the house, not even a cleaning lady. Most of the housekeeping chores fell to Popper. He found the work and the reclusive life disagreeable and often had to remind himself of the great reward that lay at the end of the ordeal. Eating as they were on one ration card, Golescu’s, they had to stint on coffee, sugar and fresh meat. Their food ran largely to canned soup, potted meat, boiled eggs, crackers, white bread and dark molasses.

  The house was cold. The only insulation was newspaper sheets pasted to the rough plank walls, and the paper was now in tatters, with the long black columns of Colorado news crumbling away. The one warm room downstairs was the kitchen, where Popper set up his cot, next to the cast-iron range. There he cooked and washed and read magazines and talked to Squanto. Golescu made his nest in an upstairs room, which he kept locked and where he maintained a potbellied stove and a small brick furnace and a hand-cranked blacksmith’s forge. Late into the night he could be heard clumping around up there tending his vessels.

  From the very beginning he had pestered Popper about the Gnomon secrets, pressing for admittance into the brotherhood. But Popper, usually so accommodating, made excuses and put him off, until one night he bluntly told him that he must give up all hope of ever becoming a Gnomon.

  “No Moslems, I’m sorry,” he said. “No Mussulmen. It’s a different culture. Alien thought patterns. I don’t say it’s fair but there it is. Furthermore, I should tell you that all these personal appeals are embarrassing to me and demeaning to you. My hands are tied, you understand. Our laws are written in blood on the dried guts of a serpent. But look here, Cezar, don’t take it so hard. You people have your rich oral tradition. Your songs of the desert. Why can’t you be satisfied with that?”

  Golescu knew nothing about the desert, and the truth was that Moslems were eligible for membership in the Society—the candidate had only to profess belief in the Living God, much as a Mason must acknowledge the Great Architect of the Universe, with no further religious test—and for that matter Golescu was not a Moslem but a communicant of the Romanian Orthodox Church. He could not get this simple fact across to Popper. What was more irritating, Popper affected a solicitous curiosity about the professor’s supposed faith. Suddenly and unexpectedly in the middle of a conversation he would raise some Islamic point.

  “Are you permitted to eat sardines?” he said. “Please don’t hesitate to speak up if I off
end.” And “Tell me honestly, Cezar, is it true that Mahomet’s body is suspended in midair in his tomb? Have you seen that with your own eyes?”

  After a while Golescu stopped protesting and made no response of any kind to these queries. He turned sullen and abandoned all efforts to become a Gnomon. Then in an amazing turnabout, Popper announced one morning that the observation period was over and that Cezar must now prepare himself for instruction.

  “A time of testing,” he said. “Nothing personal, I assure you. Everyone is turned down at first. Those who come to us unbidden must undergo special scrutiny. We like to put them under stress and observe the squirming pattern. Sometimes we slap their faces and see if they cry. Some do. You would think they had been beaten within an inch of their lives. But all that is behind us now. On behalf of the Gnomon Society I bid you welcome. You are that one man in a hundred thousand who is ever chosen.”

  The professor was so moved as to express gratitude, a rare lapse, and he was further shaken to learn that “the passing over” into Gnomonism was the work of a single afternoon.

  The instruction was scanty. Golescu had not seen so short a creed since he had attended that Knights of Corfu school in Vienna. The pledges and oaths were of a familiar kind and gave him no problem, but he was troubled by Popper’s warning about the Dark Laws. These were nine arbitrary rules that Neophytes and Initiates were not allowed to know. Should they violate one, however, they would be cast out of the Society. The induction ceremony lasted only about an hour and concluded with Golescu’s running around the Taggert house seven times with his mouth open.

  Popper stood on the front porch in overcoat and shawl and urged him on. “Pace yourself!” he shouted. When the circuits were completed he went down the steps to congratulate the professor, who was gasping and whose whiskers were coated with frost. He took Golescu’s hand in a firm and prolonged Gnomon grasp and formally proclaimed him a Neophyte and Brother in Good Standing.