Gun Island

by Amitav Ghosh

  I would learn later that the remains of a wildfire are by no means a wasteland. For certain species of birds – hawks, eagles and other raptors – they present rare opportunities for hunting: the loss of tree cover makes it easy to spot those rodents and reptiles that have survived the fire by burrowing underground. For birds of prey the conditions are so favourable that some species of raptor have even been known to actually start, or spread, wildfires by carrying burning twigs afield in their beaks.

  But of course I did not know this at the time, so I watched the circling birds in fascinated amazement. Even from that distance, some could be seen diving steeply down to forage among the ashes.

  Presently I caught a glimpse of two birds arrowing downwards together, on convergent paths: they had both evidently targeted the same prey and it seemed inevitable that they would collide. They were no larger than specks and I lost sight of them as they dropped down, towards the blackened earth. But a minute or two later I spotted them again, one in pursuit of the other. They shot up together, twisting, manoeuvring, rising higher and higher and moving all the while, in the direction of the plane.

  As the birds grew larger I saw that one of them was holding something in its talons; this was the prize that its rival was trying to prise away. So absorbed were the birds in their pursuit that they were rising ever higher, at great speed. And since the plane was descending steeply it wasn’t long before the birds were actually above us. Then at last the bird in the lead seemed to tire of the chase. Flipping itself over it tossed away its prey – a twisting, writhing, sinuous animal.

  As I watched the creature flying through the air a sound burst from my throat – I would later hear it described as a ‘scream’.

  I was not aware then of what I had done, and when I heard raised voices and cries of alarm I did not imagine that they had anything to do with me.

  But suddenly a steward and stewardess converged on my seat, along with a big, burly man in a dark suit – I knew at a glance that he was a security agent in plain clothes.

  ‘That’s enough, sir!’

  The agent reached over, unbuckled my seat belt and pulled me to my feet. ‘You need to come with me, sir.’

  Within a couple of minutes I was sitting beside the agent, with a plastic tie around my wrists. I sat there stunned, with my eyes closed, listening. All around me voices were whispering about the suspiciousness of my behaviour and how I had been disruptive from the start.

  Squads of policemen and blue-suited agents were waiting for me when I was finally allowed to leave the plane. They led me to a blindingly bright, neon-lit room, where they unfastened my hands and demanded that I hand over my cellphone and laptop, along with my passwords. Too rattled to resist, I complied, and was left to wait alone at a steel desk.

  There was nothing for me to do but stare at my watch, and the more I stared the more convinced I became that this trip had been a terrible idea from the start, that there was something ill-fated about it and that I should go back to New York on the next available flight.

  By the time the door opened again more than an hour had passed, and I had decided that if I was not detained after my interrogation I would go straight to the ticketing desk and get on a flight to New York, no matter what the cost.

  But to my surprise there was no interrogation. I was handed my cellphone and laptop by two blue-suited agents, one of whom held the door open and told me I was free to go.

  ‘Is that all?’ I was almost disappointed.

  ‘Yes, sir. That’s all. You’re free to leave.’

  As I was getting my things together one of the agents said: ‘What made you do that?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘The crew said that you kept screaming “Snake! Snake!” You should know that you can’t do that on a plane.’

  I moistened my lips, trying to think of something to say.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what got into me.’

  I was almost out of the room when the other agent said: ‘Do you always get a lot of calls from Turkey?’

  My mouth fell open. ‘Sir,’ I said guardedly, ‘I very rarely get calls. And I don’t think I’ve ever got a call from Turkey in my life.’

  The agent raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? That’s weird.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because your phone kept ringing this last hour. The caller’s number had the country code for Turkey.’

  I gaped at him, dumbfounded. ‘Oh? I have no idea…’

  Wandering out to the arrivals halls, I stopped to check my phone. I saw that I had ten missed calls, all from a number that was preceded by the code + 90. Hesitantly I touched the return call button and raised the phone to my ears: it rang a few times but there was no answer.

  When I put the phone away I realized that I had wandered out of the airport and was standing near a taxi line. To go back into the airport to arrange a return flight was more than I could bring myself to do; I was exhausted. Instead I got into a taxi and gave the driver the name of my hotel.

  By the time I reached the hotel it was almost midnight. My room was on the fifteenth floor and it was even more luxurious than I had expected.

  I was now completely exhausted and eager to get into bed. But as I was slipping between the soft, white sheets I noticed a strange orange glow around the edges of the curtains. Rousing myself, I went to the window and pulled back the curtains. They opened on a landscape that seemed to be ablaze with fire and smoke. It took me a while to realize that the fires were actually many miles away; in the darkness of the night they seemed to fill the horizon, from end to end.

  The sight was mesmerizing. When at last I fell asleep I saw the fires again in my dreams, with a glowing snake hurtling towards me, through the flames.

  Los Angeles

  Next morning there was much confusion in the lobby, largely because the hotel had rearranged its dining rooms so that its guests would not have to gaze at waves of flame as they breakfasted.

  I had been hoping to have breakfast with Cinta but she was nowhere to be seen. After a long and fruitless search I was told that her flight had been delayed because of the fires. She had arrived very late at night and would not be joining us until later in the day.

  Swallowing my disappointment I fell in behind the others as they filed out to board the buses that were to take us to the conference.

  The museum that was hosting the conference was celebrated for its architecture and landscaping. The buses and cars that brought visitors to its gates were allowed no further than the car park at the entrance; from there on transportation across the grounds was provided by the museum’s own fleet of sleek, electric vehicles.

  I had visited the museum several times before and in my experience the system had always worked with clockwork precision: visitors had no sooner set foot in the parking area than they were whisked away in liveried shuttle buses.

  But this was not the case when we arrived for the opening event of the conference: there were no shuttle buses anywhere in sight and, odder still, the car park, which usually filled up as soon as the museum opened its gates, was almost empty.

  There was only a single security guard at the entrance and all she could tell us was that the museum was drastically short-handed that morning; many of her colleagues had not been able to get to work because of road closures caused by the still-raging wildfires.

  This disclosure set off a buzz of consternation among us: What about the conference? Was it to be called off?

  The guard put through a call to her boss and a couple of minutes later a voice spoke to us through a speakerphone. It was the museum’s director. Everything would go ahead as planned, he said. There was nothing to worry about; he had been assured by the city authorities that the wildfires posed no direct threat to the museum. We just needed to be a little patient because of the shortage of staff – everything would be taken care of very soon.

  And sure enough, within a few minutes a convoy of shuttle buses pulled into the car park. />
  The museum’s principal buildings were located on the spine of a steep ridge. The site commanded panoramic views stretching from the hills in the east to the sea on the western horizon.

  But that morning nobody looked either at the hills or the sea; every eye was drawn in the same direction, towards the north-east, where a dark cloud had reared up above the horizon, taking the shape of an immense wave, complete with a frothing white top. From where we stood it looked as though a gigantic tsunami were advancing upon the distant outskirts of the city.

  The sight was so riveting that ushers had to be sent to herd us into the auditorium for the opening event.

  * * *

  On stepping into the auditorium I recognized several acquaintances. They were bibliophiles, librarians, experts on book-making and of course rare book dealers like myself. It was a largely grey-haired crowd, sprinkled with more than its fair share of blue blazers, bow ties and strings of pearls.

  The opening speaker, however, was conspicuously not of our ilk: he was a trendy young historian who had gained a reputation as a peddler of Big Ideas. The subject that he had elected to speak on (as we discovered on entering the auditorium) was ‘Climate and Apocalypse in the Seventeenth Century’.

  This grandiose title kindled a certain scepticism in the audience, and that mood was in no part allayed by the speaker’s hipsterish appearance: a hirsute youth, he was dressed in pencil-thin trousers and a waistcoat that seemed to be made from straw. Nor did it help that he chose to begin on a bombastic note.

  The seventeenth century, declared the historian, was a period of such severe climatic disruption that it was sometimes described as the ‘Little Ice Age’. During this time temperatures across the globe had dropped sharply, maybe because of fluctuations in solar activity, or a spate of volcanic eruptions – or possibly even because of the reforestation of vast tracts of land following on the genocide of Amerindian peoples after the European conquests of the Americas.

  In any event many parts of the world had been struck by famines, droughts and epidemics in the seventeenth century. At the same time a succession of comets had appeared in the heavens, and the earth had been shaken by a tremendous outbreak of seismic activity; earthquakes had torn down cities and volcanoes had ejected untold quantities of dust and debris into the atmosphere. Millions had died: in some parts of the world the population had declined by a third. In these decades more wars had raged than at any time before: many parts of Europe had been convulsed by conflict; England had experienced the greatest internal upheaval in its history – civil war – and central Europe had been devastated by the Thirty Years War; in Turkey a fearsome drought had led to a devastating fire in Istanbul, shaking the Ottoman Empire to its foundations; elsewhere, as in China, long-established dynasties had been overthrown amidst torrents of blood; in India the Mughal Empire had been beset by famine and rebellion. A great wave of suicides had swept the world; in China multitudes of Ming loyalists had killed themselves; in Russia an Orthodox sect called the Old Believers had declared the tsar to be the Antichrist and tens of thousands of its members had taken their own lives. And everywhere there was talk of apocalypse: the comets that were streaking through the heavens were thought to be portents of the destruction of the universe; even the creatures of the earth were believed to be conveying warnings of catastrophe. In many parts of the earth clouds of locusts had darkened the sky and vast swarms of rodents had stripped the land bare; in Italy there was a sudden crescendo in visions inspired by the bites of tarantulas – and in England dreams of beasts, from the Book of David, had caused a sect called the Fifth Monarchists to rise up against the government, only to be brutally slaughtered.

  But the great paradox of this era, the speaker continued, was that these upheavals had been accompanied also by an extraordinary intellectual and creative ferment: this was the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, the century of Hobbes, Leibniz, Newton, Spinoza and Descartes, and the world had been enriched by many masterpieces of literature, art and architecture, including …

  Here he named a number of seventeenth-century masterpieces – and among them there was one that served to jolt my memory: the Taj Mahal. That name took my mind back to India, and it occurred to me that the temples of Bishnupur were built at about the same time as the Taj. This in turn reminded me of the Gun Merchant’s shrine … and I suddenly recalled the droughts, famines, storms and plagues that played so large a part in the legend.

  Was it possible that the legend was born of the tribulations of the Little Ice Age?

  For a while I was lost in my own thoughts and when my attention returned to my surroundings I saw that the talk was over. The speaker was now being aggressively questioned by a curmudgeonly antiquarian.

  ‘… what you’ve given us, sir, is merely a list of coincidences … anybody with a couple of hours to spare could produce a similar catalogue of floods, quakes and wars for other centuries … you are juxtaposing things that have no connection … anyway what does Jacobean drama have to do with the weather?… And people everywhere have always imagined themselves to be heading towards apocalypse … that’s because every generation likes to think that it’s special and everything will come to an end when they’re gone … these seventeenth-century zealots were no different from millions of others, before and after them!’

  This rebuttal played well with the audience, meeting with a chorus of approbatory murmurs and whispers.

  But the stirrings in the auditorium had little effect on the speaker, who would not yield an inch.

  ‘And what if the millenarians were right? Couldn’t it be said that it was in the seventeenth century that we started down the path that has brought us to where we are now? After all, it was then that Londoners began to use coal on a large scale, for heating, which was how our dependence on fossil fuels started. Would your Jacobean playwrights have written as they did if they hadn’t had coal fires to warm them? Did they know that an angry beast, which had long lain dormant within the earth, was coming to life? Did Hobbes or Leibniz or any of the other thinkers of the Enlightenment have any understanding of this?’

  He paused to cast a dramatic glance around the room.

  ‘It would seem that the intellectual titans of the Enlightenment had no inkling of what was getting under way. Yet, strangely, all around the earth, ordinary people appear to have sensed the stirring of something momentous. They seemed to have understood that a process had been launched that could lead ultimately to catastrophe: what they didn’t allow for was that the story might take a few hundred years to play out. It has fallen to us, centuries later, to bear witness to the last turn of the wheel. And what we are seeing already –’ he paused to point a finger in the direction of the distant wildfires – ‘should be enough to remind us that the climatic perturbations of the Little Ice Age were trivial compared to what is in store for us now. What our ancestors experienced is but a pale foreshadowing of what the future holds!’

  This answer exasperated the book dealer who turned to the audience and announced, with a roll of his eyes: ‘I feel like I’m back in 1999, arguing with some kid who thinks the world is going to end at the stroke of midnight…’

  A gale of laughter blew through the auditorium. And just as it was receding another, far more strident noise, burst upon us: the wailing of a fire alarm.

  I was rising to my feet when the sound died and a voice came over the speaker system: ‘I’m sorry about that…’

  It was the director of the museum; he had stepped up to the podium and was speaking into a microphone.

  ‘We’ve just been told that we need to evacuate this building, as a precaution. It’s something to do with the wind – the wildfires are moving faster than expected. But there’s absolutely no need to worry – we only want to keep everyone safe. Our se- curity team will help you find the exits…’

  We filed out quietly, blinking in the bright California sunlight.

  The tsunami of smoke in the distance was still in the same place – or so
it seemed to me, although some of the others thought that it had moved a little closer. It was difficult to be sure.

  After a few minutes the director’s voice was heard again.

  He told us that his staff had been hard at work and had found an alternative venue for the conference: none other than the hotel where we were staying! A hall, and a suite of meeting rooms, had been made available to us, so apart from a few minor adjustments everything would go ahead as planned!

  He ended with a cry that roused a chorus of cheers: ‘We’ve got to show Mother Nature that we’re not quitters!’

  This announcement did much to restore our spirits: there were many who felt that the new arrangements were an improvement on the original plan; with the hotel as the conference’s venue, it would be easy to slip away to our rooms – or the pool, or the bar, for that matter.

  All in all nobody was unduly put out by the changes. And I, for one, welcomed the disruption, because it was then that I caught sight of a great mop of white hair: Cinta was leaning on a balustrade staring at the distant wildfires.

  * * *

  On the way back to the hotel, sitting beside Cinta on the bus, I said: ‘What did you think of that keynote? Do you think he was right, about the seventeenth century and today?’

  ‘Oh yes, Dino,’ said Cinta. ‘Assolutamente, I feel it all the time now, every day when I read the papers. It’s as though the Little Ice Age is rising from its grave and reaching out to us.’

  ‘And to me too – through you.’