Against the Day

by Thomas Pynchon

  “This is terrible,” he said. “Look at this. These people have nothing.”

  “Which hasn’t kept the Germans from picking it over,” Prance said. Up until about 800 or 900 A.D., he went on to explain, this had been the metropolis of the ancient kingdom of Khocho. Some scholars, in fact, believed this to be the historical Shambhala. For four hundred years, Turfan had been the most civilized place in Central Asia, a convergence of gardens, silks, music—fertile, tolerant, and compassionate. No one went hungry, all shared in the blessings of an oasis that would never run dry. Imperial Chinese journeyed thousands of hard miles here to see what real sophistication looked like. “Then the Mahommedans swept in,” said Prance, “and next came Genghis Khan, and after him the desert.”

  At Turfan they turned north, away from the Taklamakan, toward Urumchi and the pass just beyond, which cut through the Tian Shan and led down into the lowlands of Dzungaria, looking to head north by northwest, skirt the Altai, and, depending which river by that time was clear of ice, find a steamer to take them down to pick up the Trans-Siberian Railway east to Irkutsk.

  They made root soup, shot and barbecued wild sheep, but let the wild pigs go their way in deference to Hassan, who had moved quite beyond dietary prohibitions but saw no use in telling the English about it.

  Other foreign parties were out and about, many of them German archaeological scavengers, though sometimes Prance, held by the gravity of memory, lay peering attentively through his field-glasses for what seemed hours before announcing, “They’re Russian. Notice how low their tents are pitched.”

  “Should we—”

  “Good reasons for and against. They’re probably more interested in Germans and Chinese. With the Entente, the Great Game is supposedly ended out here, but old suspicions linger, and some of these Russian troopers would as soon shoot as look at us.”

  In higher country one day, they blundered into a stampede of about fifty kiangs, wild red Asian asses, each with a dark stripe down its back, rolling their eyes and moving fast, likely spooked by the approach of humans. “Holy Toledo,” said Kit, “that’s sure some wild ass stampede.” They took refuge in a grove of flowering hemp which they had first begun to smell about midday, long before it came in sight. The plants were about twelve feet high, the fragrance alone enough to stun a traveler into waking dream. Hassan for the first time seemed encouraged, as if this were a message from a realm with which he had done business. He went about like an Englishman in a rose-garden, carefully inhaling aromas, peering at and selecting flowering and fruiting heads of ganja, until he had picked a good-size bale. For days then the fragrant tops hung upside down in the sun, tied to the cargo lashings on the camels, swaying as they stepped along. Whenever Prance attempted to remove a bud, Hassan appeared from nowhere and slapped his hand away. “Not cured yet. Not ready to smoke.”

  “And when it is . . .”

  “I must reflect. It is not really for English, but perhaps we may strike a bargain.”

  The wind, which was alive, conscious, and not kindly disposed to travelers, had a practice of coming up in the middle of the night. The camels smelled it first, then slowly everyone else in the party began to hear it, its unstoppable crescendo, giving them too little time to devise shelter, and to which often the only resort was to submit, pressed against the earth flat as any stalk of grass, and try not to be taken away into the sky.

  Wolves gathered and watched all night, it was uncertain whether to look after them or take what was left when the wind was done with them. Prance seemed to live on little else but a local stomach remedy the Uyghurs called gül kän, made from fermented rose petals, which he carried an enormous canteen of and was reluctant, indeed surly, about sharing with anybody else. Hassan retaliated by keeping a wary eye on his supply of ganja, which he was using, it turned out, as a sort of trade goods, endearing the party to everyone on the route from Finnish Tatars hunting in the Altai to Cossack ice-fishers at Lake Zaisan. The Irtysh by then was still frozen, so they pressed on to Barnaul on the Ob in time for the great boom and rip of the spring thaw, waking everybody just before dawn, echoing back up into the mountains, and presently caught a steamer there, filled with miners, traders, and Tsarist functionaries, and they all went bouncing like a toboggan 120 miles down to the tiny railroad workers’ settlement of Novosibirsk, to wait beside the wide-gauge tracks for the train to Irkutsk.

  “SO THIS IS IRKUTSK.”

  “The Paris of Siberia.”

  More like Saturday night in the San Juans all over again, as it turned out. All day, all night. The town was a peculiar combination of rip-roaring and respectable. Gold miners drank vodka, played vint, argued politics, and shot at each other in a spirit of fatalistic play. The kupechestvo stayed in their substantial homes over in Glaskovsk, keeping to parts of town relevant to business, pretending to ignore the lowlife element, which well within living memory had included themselves.

  “Some pilgrimage,” Kit looking around through a pall of tobacco and hemp smoke at the spectacle inside the Club Golomyanka, where he and Prance had stopped in to celebrate, or at least commemorate, their arrival.

  “Out here pilgrimage is a matter of kind and wrathful deities. Timing. Guidance.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Ask Hassan.”

  “Hassan disappeared the minute we got to the Lake.”

  “Exactly.”

  Their instructions were to report to a Mr. Swithin Poundstock, a British national active in the business of importing and exporting, “And it won’t do,” Auberon Halfcourt had been most emphatic, “to press him for further details.” They found him down at the port of Irkutsk, in his warehouse going about with an inkpot and brush stenciling on a number of heavy crates the somehow unconvincing term NAUSHNIKI. “Earmuffs,” Prance muttered. “I think not, not in this life.” Despite the air of general bustle in the great dim space, a number of employees seemed to be chiefly engaged in observing Kit and Prance with ill-disguised unfriendliness.

  “How’s Halfcourt?” the merchant greeted them. “Barking mad of course, but what else?”

  “He sends—” Prance began.

  “And listen, what about Hassan?”

  Prance frowned in perplexity. “The native guide? I don’t know, he disappeared.”

  “Before he disappeared,” with perhaps a touch of impatience, “did he leave anything for me?”

  “Oh.” From a Gladstone bag, Prance handed over a small package wrapped in oilcloth, through which Kit could detect the distinctive nasal signature of wild hemp. With an effort he refrained from comment, which was just as well, for Poundstock was not quite done. He led them toward the back of the facility, where, slowly growing louder, a rhythmical and metallic percussion could be heard. They arrived at a steel door, before which stood two large, thuggish personalities each packing an 1895 model Nagant revolver. “What,” muttered one of them, “you again?”

  Inside, a large coining press of a certain vintage was stamping out what looked like British gold sovereigns. Except that they weren’t gold, more a coppery silver, as Poundstock explained. “Old Chinese coins, basically. What they call ‘cash.’ Silver, bronze, the content varies depending what comes in that day. We melt it down, cast ingots, roll fillets, cut blanks, strike the design, and electroplate with a very thin layer of gold. Can’t tell them from the real thing.”

  “But they’re all—”

  “Don’t say it. Thanks to friends at Tower Hill, the dies we use are perfectly genuine. It really is young Vic here on every one of these. And that’s what matters, isn’t it.”

  “I don’t know. Can they be spent? Legally?”

  “Interesting concept, especially out here. We’ll start you off with a thousand, how’s that? You be the judge. Two? Not as heavy as you’d think, really.” With a stove shovel, he filled a sturdy brass-trimmed box with pseudo-sovereigns. “All yours. One last thing, the standard sermon, and you can be off to your adventures.” He ushered them into an adjoining office
, dominated by a map of eastern Siberia.

  “Here is where you’ll be operating—the three great river basins east of the Yenisei—Upper Tunguska, Stony Tunguska, Lower Tunguska. For years the Tungus clans who occupy each of these river valleys have been at war, in particular the Ilimpiya, who live along the Lower Tunguska, and the Shanyagir, who occupy the Stony Tunguska. The key figure in this, perhaps even the one your Doosra reports to, is a shaman of great regional fame named Magyakan, who has been active on behalf of the Ilimpiya.”

  “And which representatives of the great Powers are we likely to meet?”

  “You’ve probably already met,” Poundstock shrugged. “Bon voyage, gents.”

  And they were on the move once again, aboard a river steamer down the Angara, as it was known at this end—its name would change farther along to Upper Tunguska—past the city, beneath the great flying bridge, borne by the current flowing out of Lake Baikal, north into the beating heart of shamanic Asia.

  The other passengers were siberyaki, prospectors, gamblers, Cossack enterprisers, fugitives from the wide, well-lit streets and whatever these might have required as appropriate behavior. They passed alder swamps and bamboo groves and pale green reindeer moss. Bears foraging for cowberries paused to watch them. Baby Siberian cranes learning to fly rose briefly against the sky.

  At Bratsk there was a deep gorge with pine forests and violent rapids, which everybody had to get out and go around by land, through a vast swarm of mosquitoes so thick it darkened the sun, to where another boat waited to continue the journey.

  They got off a couple of days later at Yeniseisk, and found Kirghiz horses and brush supplies, and Kit was surprised to hear Prance talking the lingo a mile a minute. “Tungus, Buriatic, Mongol, question of accent, really, a certain attitude of the vocal apparatus, embouchure, breathing. . . .”

  They picked up their luggage at the dock, including the box full of Poundstock’s gold-plated sovereigns. Prance’s instructions were to hand them out to any natives likely to be useful, filling them in when possible on the topic of the Queen whose image appeared on the obverse. “I tell them she’s alive,” he admitted, with little embarrassment. “That she is our greatest shaman. She has conquered time. She never ages. Sort of thing.”

  “What about all the Germans out in these woods telling them otherwise? They’re gonna find out she’s dead, Prance.”

  “I tell them she is the ruler of Shambhala.”

  “They must know that’s horseshit, too.”

  “It worked for Dorzhieff in Tibet. He told the Dalai Lama that the Tsar was the king of Shambhala—though that wouldn’t do out here, the Tungus hate any Tsar no matter who it is, just on principle. We’re supposed to find the local shaman and see if he can’t put in a good word, anything to help along the old Entente, don’t you know.”

  “So, see if I have this straight, the Tsar is King of Shambhala, Victoria is Queen of Shambhala, that makes it a Shambhala-Shambhala alliance—sort of, I don’t know, quadratic isn’t it? and aren’t they related somehow?”

  “By marriage,” with a look Kit was used to by now, a mixture of impatience, disapproval, and fear that there was some joke he wasn’t getting.

  KEEPING MAINLY TO RIVERBANKS, they made their way among wildcat coal-mining works, thickets of willow and wild cherry, meadows full of wildflowers that seemed to Kit enormous, violets as big as your hand, yellow lilies and blue veronica you could shelter from the rain under, looking for word of the shaman Magyakan, if not the man in person. Like the taiga, he was everywhere, and mysterious—a heroic being with unearthly gifts. They heard tales of how he had been shot once with a rifle, by a Russian soldier, and had calmly reached into his body and pulled out the bullet, over an inch long, shining and bloodless. Presented it to the sky. Living witnesses had beheld this. He had power over the iron creatures of Agdy, Lord of the Thunder, and knew how to call them down at will, their eyes flashing, their fury inexorable. “You see what happens out here,” Prance instructed Kit, “you get these conflations, ‘Agdy’ is the Hindu fire-god Agni, of course, but almost certainly also Ogdai Khan, son of Jenghiz Khan, who succeeded to the Mongol Empire and extended his father’s conquests east and west, from China to Hungary.”

  “What if it’s just the name of whoever sends these iron things down at those Shanyagir folks?” Kit inquired, for whatever annoyance value there might be in that.

  “There are no iron things, there are no iron things, that’s the point,” screamed Lieutenant Prance. “These bloody shamans tell the people anything, no matter how insane, and the people believe them, it’s like Americans, only different.”

  “Think this Magyakan is the one the Doosra was talking about?”

  Prance had no idea, and moreover, as he was quite happy to let Kit know, he didn’t care.

  “Strange attitude for a divinity scholar to be taking, isn’t it?”

  “Traverse, for God’s sake.” Prance had been smoking all day and developed an impatient growl. “There is light, and there is darkness.”

  “Let me guess. The Church of England is light, and everything else—”

  “Not quite how it sorts out. Differences among the world religions are in fact rather trivial when compared to the common enemy, the ancient and abiding darkness which all hate, fear, and struggle against without cease”—he made a broad gesture to indicate the limitless taiga all around them—“Shamanism. There isn’t a primitive people anywhere on Earth that can’t be found practicing some form of it. Every state religion, including your own, considers it irrational and pernicious, and has taken steps to eradicate it.”

  “What? there’s no ‘state religion’ in the U.S.A., pardner, we’ve got freedom of worship, it’s guaranteed in the Constitution—keeps church and state separate, just so’s we don’t turn into something like England and keep marching off into the brush with bagpipes and Gatling guns, looking for more infidels to wipe out. Nothing personal o’ course.”

  “The Cherokee,” replied Prance, “the Apache, the massacre of the Sioux Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee, every native Red Indian you’ve found, you people have either tried to convert to Christianity or you’ve simply killed.”

  “That was about land,” said Kit.

  “I suggest it was about the fear of medicine men and strange practices, dancing and drug-taking, that allow humans to be in touch with the powerful gods hiding in the landscape, with no need of any official church to mediate it for them. The only drug you’ve ever been comfortable with is alcohol, so you went in and poisoned the tribes with that. Your whole history in America has been one long religious war, secret crusades, disguised under false names. You tried to exterminate African shamanism by kidnapping half the continent into slavery, giving them Christian names, and shoving your peculiar versions of the Bible down their throats, and look what happened.”

  “The Civil War? That was economics. Politics.”

  “That was the gods you tried to destroy, waiting their hour, taking their revenge. You people really just believe everything you’re taught, don’t you?”

  “Guess I’ll have go to Cambridge and get smart,” Kit not really taking offense. Possibilities for amusement being limited out here in the taiga, why a man had to take what came along in the way of recreational squabbling. “What got you into the divinity racket anyhow?”

  “I was a religious youth,” replied Dwight Prance. “It might easily have taken other forms, choir-singing, sandal-wearing, sermonizing on street corners, it just happened to be the one choice certain to cancel itself out.”

  “That’s what you wanted?”

  “It’s what happened. As I spent more time studying religions, particularly Islam and Christianity, and began to notice the many close connections to secular power, I grew more . . . hmm, contemptuous, you’d say, of the whole enterprise.”

  “Church and state.”

  Prance shrugged. “Quite natural to find Cæsar setting up these cozy arrangements with God whenever possible, as they
’re both after the same thing, aren’t they.”

  “And you’ve gotten more interested—”

  “In the arrangements. Yes. Did you imagine I was praying every night?”

  “Then if you’re not out here soldiering for Christ—who for, exactly?”

  “A handful of men in Whitehall you’ve never heard of, whose faces no one recognizes.”

  “And the money’s good?”

  Prance’s laughter held little of the sacred, and seemed to go on for an unnaturally long time. “You’d have to speak to them about that, I expect.”

  From time to time, Kit recalled the purity, the fierce, shining purity of Lake Baikal, and how he had felt standing in the wind Hassan had disappeared into, and wondered now how his certainty then had failed to keep him from falling now into this bickering numbness of spirit. In view of what was nearly upon them, however—as he would understand later—the shelter of the trivial would prove a blessing and a step toward salvation.

  A heavenwide blast of light.

  AS OF 7:17 A.M. local time on 30 June 1908, Padzhitnoff had been working for nearly a year as a contract employee of the Okhrana, receiving five hundred rubles a month, a sum which hovered at the exorbitant end of spy-budget outlays for those years. Accordingly the great ship was riding a bit lower in the sky, its captain and crew having put on collectively at least thirty extra poods, roughly half a ton, and that didn’t include the weight of the masonry Padzhitnoff planned to drop on designated targets, which it was necessary to bring along as ballast, since most structures out here in Siberia seemed to be made of wood and brush, a difficulty which, though challenging the ekipazh in a military way, failed to contribute much to their spiritual ease until they first sighted Irkutsk from the air and were amazed by the stately brick-and-masonry homes of the nouveau riche fur traders and gold magnates, crying “Právil’no!” and embracing. When extra lift was needed, however, Russian design philosophy had ever been just to add on as much buoyancy and engine power as you had to, and so as the Bol’shaia Igra evolved through the years, weight control was never the serious engineering issue it often proved to be in the aeronautics of other lands.