Mathematics once seemed the way—the internal life of numbers came as a revelation to me, perhaps as it might have to a Pythagorean apprentice long ago in Crotona—a reflection of some less-accessible reality, through close study of which one might perhaps learn to pass beyond the difficult given world.
Professor McTaggart, at Cambridge, took what one must call the cheerful view, and I confess that for a while I shared his vision of a community of spirits in perfect concord, the old histories of blood and destruction evolved at last into an era of enlightenment and peace, which he compared to a senior combination-room without a master. I am today perhaps more of a Nietzschean, returned to thoughts of the dark future of slavery and danger from which you sought to rescue me. But one’s rescue is surely, at the end of the day, one’s own responsibility.
I had the obvious thought once that all this wandering about must have an object—a natural convergence to you, and that you and I need only be reunited for all to come clear at last. But more and more lately, I find I cannot set aside your profession, the masters you serve, the interests which all this time out there in Inner Asia, however unconsciously, you have been furthering. These are matters upon which you always observed the strictest vow of Silence, and I expect no argument I advance, even now as a competent adult, could induce you to break it. Though I cannot with certainty say when or even if I may see you again, I was haunted by the possibility that, if we ever did meet at last, we might both, against our wills, stumble into a serious, perhaps a fatal, row.
But you came to me last night in a dream. You said, “I am not at all as you have imagined me.” You took my hand. We ascended, or rather, we were taken aloft, as if in mechanical rapture, to a great skyborne town and a small band of serious young people, dedicated to resisting death and tyranny, whom I understood at once to be the Compassionate. Their faces were strangely specific, faces which could easily appear in the waking day here below, men and women I should recognize in the moment for who they were. . . .
They used to visit all the time, coming in swiftly out of the empty desert, lighted from within. I did not dream this, Father. Each time when they went away again, it was to return to “The Work of the World”—always that same phrase—a formula, a prayer. Theirs was the highest of callings. If there was any point to our living in that terrible wilderness, it was to persist in the hope of being brought in among them someday, to learn the Work, to transcend the World.
Why have they remained silent, for so long? Silent and invisible. Have I lost the ability to recognize them? the privilege? I must find them again. It must not be too late for me. I imagine sometimes that you have led an expedition to Shambhala, troops of horsemen in red jackets, and are there now, safe, among the Compassionate. Please. If you know anything, please. I can go on wandering, but I cannot remain at this stage of things—I must ascend, for down here I am so blind and vulnerable, and it torments my heart—
Do you know of the sixteenth-century Tibetan scholar-prince Rinpungpa? Mourning the recent passing of his father, which has made him the last of his dynasty, his new reign beset with enemies, Rinpungpa believes he can look for advice only toward Shambhala, where his father has been reborn and now dwells. So the prince writes him a letter, though he knows of no way to deliver it. But then, in a vision, a Yogi appears to him, who is also himself, the man of clarity and strength he knows he must become, now that his father has gone to Shambhala—and Rinpungpa also understands that it is this Yogi who will be his messenger.
Mr. Kit Traverse, who brings you this letter, like myself, journeys at the mercy of Forces whose deployment and strength he has but an imperfect grasp of, which may well cause him damage. He must continue, as must I, an intensive schooling in modes of evasion and escape, even, with luck, now and then, counter-attack. He is not my “other self,” yet in some way I feel that he is my brother.
Father, I have long known of a strange doubleness to my life—a child rescued from slavery yet continuing her journey along the same ancient road of abasement. Somewhere another version of me is at Shambhala with you. This version of me which has stayed behind, like Prince Rinpungpa, must be content with writing a letter. If you receive it, please find a way to answer.
My love.
Insh’allah.
AFTERWARD PEOPLE WOULD ASK Kit why he hadn’t brought along a hand camera. By then he was noticing how many Europeans had begun to define themselves by where they’d been able to afford to travel, part of the process being to bore interminably anybody who’d sit still for it with these ill-framed, out-of-focus snaps.
He kept some of the ticket stubs, so he knew in a general way that his route had taken him via Bucharest, to Constantza, where he boarded a small, bedraggled steamer, sailed along the Black Sea coast to Batumi, where you could smell the lemon groves before you saw them, got on a train there and crossed the Caucasus where Russians stood out in front of dukhans to watch them go by, raising their vodka glasses amiably. Fields of rhododendrons spilled down the mountainsides, and giant walnut logs came floating steeply downstream, destined for saloon bars like those in Colorado that Kit had once lounged against as a boy. Last stop on the line was Baku on the Caspian Sea, where he had the impression, though not the photographic evidence, of a very remote sandswept oil port, night in the daytime, skies of hell, boiling red and black, shades of black, no escape from the smell, streets that led nowhere, never more than a step from some drugged stupor or rugrider’s blade, with life not only cheap but sometimes of negative value—according to Western field reps more than happy to bend his ear on the topic, nobody to depend on, too much money to be made, too easy to lose it . . . the only relief from it being the parties held aboard corporate yachts moored among oil tankers down at the quays, portholes sealed against the sand and the smell of oil. The futures of these visitors, actuarially speaking, did not to Kit seem bright, and he left Baku regarding in some horror from the weather decks the port receding under black skies, among pillars of fire, wellsprings of natural gas burning since the days of the ancient fire-worshippers, scrawls of oil towers and loading piers against the blurred light off the water.
So he crossed the Caspian Sea, among Bnito oil tankers and sturgeon fleets, boarding at Krasnovodsk the Trans-Caspian Railroad, which took him along the edge of the Qara Qum opening vastly, incomprehensibly to the left, while to the right, like a parable, irrigation ditches and cotton fields spread up toward the mountains, with folks selling melons at the water stops. What he found memorable as he proceeded was less the scenery than a sort of railroad-metaphysics, as he stood between carriages, out in the wind, facing first one side, then the other, two radically different pieces of country. Plains flowed by right to left, mountains left to right, two opposite flows, each borne by the unimaginable mass of the entire visible world, each flowing at the speed of the train, an ongoing collision in silence, the vectorial nature of whose currents was clear enough, though not the roles of time and his own observing consciousness with its left- and right-handedness. The effect of rotating ninety degrees from a moving timeline, as expected, was delivery into a space containing imaginary axes—the journey seemed to be unfolding in three dimensions, but there were the added elements. Time could not, somehow, be taken for granted. It sped up and slowed down, like a variable that was dependent on something else, something so far, at least, undetectable.
At Merv the tracks swung leftward into the desert, open as weatherless sky, herds of gazelles darting like flocks of birds across it. The structure out here was revealed immediately—desert punctuated by oases in a geography of cruelty, barkhans or traveling sand-dunes a hundred feet high, which might or might not possess consciousness, cloaked and hooded, not earthly projections of the angel of death, exactly, for species here had gained a reputation for their ability to hold on even under the worst conditions—the predators tended to be skyborne, the prey to live beneath the surface, with the surface itself, defining them one to another, a region of blankness, a field within which the deadly
transactions were to be performed. Oases, or distant smoky blurs of saksaul trees, appeared like moments of remission in lives of misfortune—rumored, hallucinated, prayed for, not always where they were supposed to be.
From his briefing by Lionel Swome, Kit gathered that the Trans-Caspian, as well as the Trans-Siberian and other lines, had been of the essence of the 1905 revolution, and there was still plenty of post-revolutionary evidence as they rolled along—sheds burned to charcoal crosshatching, abandoned freight cars, groups of riders in the distance moving too swiftly and coherently to be camel caravans.
“Last year it was worth your life to spend much time out here. You had to be armed and travel in numbers. Banditry pure and simple.”
Kit had fallen into conversation with a footplate man who was deadheading back out to Samarkand, where he lived with his wife and children.
“But since Namaz Premulkoff broke out of prison last year in Samarkand, that has begun to change. Namaz is a great hero in these parts. He brought fifty men out of jail with him, and in no time at all they had become a bit more than mortal. The exploits were remarkable enough, but practically speaking Namaz also brought a discipline to the great anger and discontent out here and, most importantly, revealed the Russians to be the true enemy.” He nodded out the window at a purposeful dustcloud in the distance. “These are no longer bands of peasants uprooted from their land—they are now organized units of resistance, their target is the Russian occupation, and the people support them widely and absolutely.”
“And Namaz still leads them?”
“The Russians say they killed him back in June, but no one believes it.” He fell silent, till he noticed Kit’s inquiring look. “Namaz is not dead. How many of the people have ever seen him in person? He is everywhere. Physically present or not—they believe. Let the Russians try to kill that.”
The principal crossing from world to world was over the wood bridge at Charjui across the wide yellow Amu-Darya, known in ancient times as the Oxus.
They stopped not at Bukhara but ten miles outside it, because the Mahommedan community there believed the railroad to be an instrument of Satan. So here instead was the new city of Kagan, with its smokestacks and mills and local dignitaries grown suddenly rich on real-estate chicanery—the waste expelled from holy Bukhara, which lay out there ten miles away as if under a magical proscription, invisible but felt.
Stops at Samarkand, Khokand, at last to the end of the line at Andizhan, from which Kit had to proceed by dirt roads to Osh, and finally over the mountains to behold at last the huge fertile market-oasis of Kashgar, unbelievably green as a garden in a vision, and beyond it the appalling emptiness of the Taklamakan.
“LIKE DAMNED STANLEY AND LIVINGSTONE all over again,” Kit was heard to mutter more than once in the next few days. “The man is not lost, and there was never any question of ‘rescue.’” Somebody had been telling Yashmeen stories, likely to scare her, it seemed to Kit, into venturing outside the T.W.I.T. sphere of safety. Which would account for why they had spirited her away from Göttingen.
Indeed, far from “lost” or “in danger,” Auberon Halfcourt was quite comfortably settled into a high-European mode of residence at the palatial Hotel Tarim, Indian cigars ready for the cutter each morning with his newspaper, fresh flowers in his sitting-room, a sinful profligacy of fountains and dripping deep foliage just past the French doors, concerts at the hour for tea, gazelle-eyed young women arriving and departing on a variety of errands, often done up in actual houri outfits of fabrics woven by a workshopful of European craftsfolk, originally brought out here as slaves, who had chosen, over their generations, to remain, far from their homes, under some dark system of indenture, passing on the secrets of how to rig the looms for these imponderable yarns of infinitesimal diameter, producing not so much lengths of cloth as surfaces of shadow, to be dyed in infusions of herbs native only to, and gathered, generally at great risk, from the all-but-inaccessible stretches of the waste country beyond this oasis.
Except for a detail or two, comparable luxuries were being enjoyed just across the courtyard by his Russian opposite number, Colonel Yevgeny Prokladka. The hired musicians—rabab, hand drums, and ghärawnay, or Chinese flute—had learned “Kalinka” and “Ochi Chorniya,” the girls, though having, many of them, some idea of what animal fur was, had never actually worn it until now, much less taken advantage of the claims it appeared to have on the Colonel’s attention—while the cuisine was resolutely Russian, based on the huge classic cookbook A Gift to Young Housewives, by E. N. Molokhovets, which the Colonel had had installed in its own cabinet in the hotel kitchen on his arrival. When he wished to make a public impression, he rode a splendid gray Orloff, which besides towering over most other horses in the streets, had an inclination to the adventuresome, which the Colonel suspected was only bad judgment but was taken usually by the locals here for bravery.
At the moment, voices from the British side of the courtyard, raised in dispute, could be heard all over the establishment—one of the routine weekly rows between Halfcourt and Mushtaq, his colleague of many years, whose ferocity in combat was by now legendary, at least among those who, misled by the abbreviation of his stature, had dared and somehow survived its effects. “Nonsense Mushtaq, here, you need to relax, man, better have a drink, oh so sorry your religion, devoutly dry aren’t you people, slipped my mind of course—”
“Spare your long-suffering and far better informed coadjutor this staff-college twaddle, sir. Time, as it seems I must again point out, grows short. Having broken off its idle mischief in the foothills of the Tian Shan, the Bol’shaia Igra is now reported over the west Taklamakan, where its mission is obvious to the lowest camel-thief.”
“Oh do let’s bring the Gatling out then! yes, and hope that evil balloon happens to sail just overhead! perhaps we shall get off a lucky shot or two! Unless of course you’d recommend wiring down to Simla for a regiment or two? Our options Mushtaq are dashedly few and not one of them practicable—but I say, your teeth—didn’t used to be that color, did they?”
“Events of late have forced me to resume the use of betel, sir. Far more beneficial to one’s health, may I add, than alcohol.”
“It’s the spitting part I could never quite get the hang of.”
“Much like vomiting, actually, though perhaps more discreet.” The two glared at each other, while from Colonel Prokladka’s establishment could be heard the sound of massed local instruments, and a laughter whose loudness and constancy did not quite make up for an all-but-complete absence of merriment.
The Russian colonel had surrounded himself with a cadre of disreputables, each with a tale of abrupt dismissal from duties west of the Urals and reassignment out here, and who by now, among them, controlled every imaginable form of vice in the town, as well as some not yet available anywhere else—his own A.D.C. or lichnyi adiutant, Klopski, for example having imported from Shanghai and installed a number of peculiar machines, steam-driven and lit by naphtha lamps brighter and more modern than any to be found in Europe, which projected, so as entirely to surround an operator seated at the control panel, in varied though not strictly natural colors, a panorama presenting a series of so-called Chinese Enigmata, so compelling in its mimickry of alternate worlds that any impulses toward innocent play had become soon enough degraded into uncontrollable habit, with souls uncounted now as willingly in bondage to these contraptions as any opium-smoker to his pipe. “Where is the harm?” shrugged Klopski. “One miserable kopeck per go—it isn’t gambling, at least not as gambling has been known up till now.”
“But your kiosks,” protested Zipyagin. “Especially the ones in the bazaar—”
“Ever the village scold, Grigori Nikolaevitch. It isn’t doing your sector any harm, not from what your girls tell me.”
“The ones you visit? Yob tvoyu mat’, I wouldn’t believe too much of what they say.” Social grimaces resembling smiles passed among them. They were gathered in seedy zastolye for this nightly moral exe
rcise at a highly illegal drinking-room out past the edge of town, almost monopolizing the place except for a handful of furtively boozing local folk.
“Nor any slackening in the opium trade, none at all. Everyone profits from these ‘Chinese’ units of yours, Klopski, including imams without number.”
“They’re entitled to a percentage, I should think.”
“They’ll convert you, it’s so certain nobody will bet on it anymore.”
“Actually I did experiment with Islam briefly. . . .”
“Vanya, I thought we all knew each other. When was this? Did you go out into the desert and begin to spin? your mind proceeding to flee in all directions at once?”
“It was just after Feodora’s letter. And then that cavalry rogue Putyanin who said he’d had her in St. Petersburg just before we shipped out—”
“So as I recall you went after him with a hand-grenade—
“He had drawn his pistol.”
“It was aimed at his own head, Vanya.”
“Poshol ty na khuy, how would you know? You were the first one out the door.”
THE CHIEF ITEM of concern in this paradise of the dishonorable was a prophet known locally as “the Doosra,” operating somewhere north of here, who had been driven—according to those, naturally, with the feeblest grasp of the concept—“mad” by the desert. As often happened out here, he had changed into a living fragment of the desert, cruel, chaste, unstained by reflection. It was uncertain how this had come about—hereditary madness, operatives from over one of the horizons, shamanic influence closer to home—one day, somehow, though never having ventured out of the Taklamakan, he announced, as if having been conducted to a height nowhere on earth obtainable, a sharply detailed vision of north Eurasia, a flood of light sweeping in a single mighty arc from Manchuria west to Hungary, an immensity which must all be redeemed—from Islam, from Buddhism, from Social-Democracy and Christianity—and brought together under a single Shamanist ruler—not himself but “One who comes.”
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