End to Ordinary History

by Michael Murphy

  “But Misha,” Kirov said, “we must remember Ali Shirazi’s use of terms. ‘Every spiritual state should have ten names,’ he told us—a name for every facet of its splendor. Hurqalya is also Eran-Vej, the Zoroastrian Place of Visions at the center. It is also Jabarsa and Jabalqa, the emerald cities—or the ‘true Orient.’ Our poor conceptions only capture slivers of reality. We need many names to remind us. And it is the same with our practice. This Atabet will teach us, I think.”

  Umarov’s attendant came onto the porch with a silver samovar. They were silent while he poured their tea. Vines rustling in the first evening breeze made the only sound in the garden. The smell of roses was intense.

  “Misha,” Kirov said, “because we are going to the mechet tomorrow, it will be good for our guest to hear about our teacher.”

  In this fragrant silence, Umarov described Kirov’s grandfather, their teacher Ali Shirazi.

  Descended from Persians and Azerbaijanis who lived near the Caspian Sea, he came to Samarkand in 1891 to find the Well of Light. His teachers, followers of Iranian sheiks in the line of Suhrawardi, believed that the human form would rise at the end of history. They had used the ancient name, Hurqalya, to designate the world of resurrection, but they believed it to be completely separate from our earth—cut off from ordinary matter by an impassable river of forgetfulness. The school near Samarkand, however, held a different teaching—that a way was kept into that complex space in which the human form would rise. Bodies could go back and forth, once they learned the Way between this planet and the larger Earth in which it turned.

  The Uzbek master of the school near Samarkand saw in the young Shirazi those gifts of bodily rebirth that marked an adept of the Way. Before he died he made him his successor.

  Shirazi brought to the school the language of Neoplatonic Iranian seers descended from Suhrawardi, a language especially informed by the belief of Ahmad Ahsai that each body’s subtle counterpart would rise at the end of the cosmic cycle to join its soul in Hurqalya. But Shirazi changed Sheik Ahmad’s esoteric physiology to accord with his own experience in the Well of Light. For he had learned the secret of ascent: he could move at will beyond the formations of ordinary matter.

  In the years that followed, Shirazi’s radiance and power attracted students who were neither Muslim nor Zoroastrian. For the first time, the Way of Hurqalya was joined by agnostics, Marxists, and others who did not follow traditional religions. Beginning in 1924, Muslims and Bolsheviks sat side by side in this garden, listening to his lectures and practicing his meditation. Materialists and idealists alike could find in Shirazi’s teaching ideas compatible with their own. For in the Well of Light, he said, it made no difference whether you regarded matter as the densest form of spirit or spirit as the subtlest form of matter.

  As Umarov described Shirazi’s Marxist students, Kirov thought of his father. By 1940 the Bolshevik had come to hate the patriarch. Like other Party leaders in Central Asia he saw all esotericism as an obstacle to Socialist progress. The only real progress came in this world, not another one. Shirazi’s repetition of the saying “all history is under our feet” determined him all the more to separate his son from the old man’s teaching.

  The final confrontation had happened on this very porch in 1949, after the Soviet Union’s first atomic explosion. Each man saw the event as a great beginning—for his father, the beginning of Soviet status as a superpower; for Shirazi, the opening blast of Seraphiel’s trumpet before the earth’s resurrection in the World of Hurqalya. On that day, Kirov had resolved to integrate their separate visions. The transformations of body and soul that Shirazi taught must be compatible with his father’s social progress. He would work all his life to join them.

  Umarov ended his account with a description of Shirazi’s carriage and looks. He was descended, it was said, from Alexander’s Macedonian soldiers—that accounted for his startling blue eyes. And he was tall for an Azerbaijani. Until he died, he dressed in the traditional manner of the Uzbeks, wearing a long cotton robe in the heat and a khalat when the weather turned cold. He died in 1953, two months after Stalin’s death, leaving the school’s protection and guidance to Kirov and Umarov, who were then nineteen and thirty-three.

  “We were young,” Umarov murmured. “Too young. We are still too young, perhaps.” A gentle mood had filled him as he talked, softening the lines of his face. The patriarch seemed a presence in the garden. Fall wondered if he were attracted by their reminiscences from the Earth of Hurqalya.

  “Can souls in Hurqalya return?” Kirov asked, as if reading Fall’s mind. “What are we to think of these tales? Will they vanish in the morning light? Sometimes I ask that question. That is why I have collected the reports I told you about, all the studies of consciousness and special powers of the body. Someday, perhaps, we will compare our evidence.”

  Umarov studied Kirov’s face, wondering if he would tell Fall his true identity. But this was not the time, Kirov had decided. In the days ahead, innocence would be Fall’s best protection.

  17

  IT HAD BEEN TWO HOURS since they left the paved road from Tashkent, and their driver, a middle-aged Uzbek who knew each turn of the trail, had parked their Russian jeep to let the motor cool. Fall climbed a rock to survey the valley below. He could see no sign of life between this ridge and the distant horizon. The dry yellow hills stretched some twenty miles to the west, turning red as the sun set behind them.

  “We are on the edge of the desert,” Kirov said. “Nobody lives within a hundred miles, except for a few sheepherders.”

  Fall stamped his feet for warmth. “How do you get up this trail when it’s raining?” he asked.

  “You don’t. In the winter, our people go for months without supplies. That is a time for fasts and vigils.”

  Kirov and the driver got back in the jeep, Fall taking a seat behind them. With a lurch they started up the hill.

  “He has driven this road for twenty years,” Kirov shouted. “You “have nothing to fear.”

  They climbed a narrow gorge in the jeep’s lowest gear, the wheels spinning at times in loose sand. Looking back, Fall watched the valley darken. Not a single light marked a human dwelling. After ascending for fifteen minutes, they reached a sandy plateau. “There it is!” Kirov said, pointing to a hill some two miles distant. “You can see its minaret.”

  The ancient retreat stood silhouetted against the dark blue sky, a tower, and parapets. Kirov reached across the driver and blinked the headlights twice. He repeated the signal and a light from the tower answered.

  The driver found a trail along the plateau’s western edge. Looking up, Fall saw a vulture high above them, its wings ablaze in the last rays of the sun. They were a thousand feet above the valley. Sandy wastes stretched in darkness toward the red horizon.

  After this treacherous drive, Fall’s excitement had given way to fatigue. He gripped his seat as they negotiated another incline, hoping they would soon reach the mosque. Kirov, though, felt a growing peace. Despite the wind and the roar of the engine, he sensed the presence he had known since his boyhood, the stillness in which this wild country seemed to hang suspended.

  They passed between two boulders and stopped. Directly above stood the fortress walls. Then, to Fall’s amazement, a wooden gate swung open, revealing a Soviet flag illuminated by the light of two torches. The bearded man who held it waved them on, lowering the Hammer and Sickle toward them as they passed. “We are still Soviets,” Kirov said. “Please bow in return.”

  Though the man could not see him, Fall bowed as the gate closed behind them. Four bearded figures dressed in Uzbek robes greeted Kirov with embraces. Bowing toward Fall and the driver, they began to unload the supplies that Kirov had brought from Tashkent.

  The courtyard they had entered was sixty yards long and forty yards wide, and was enclosed by walls that rose some thirty feet above them. The air was heavy and still, though the wind outside was howling.

  “Follow me,” Kirov said. “The dr
iver will bring our bags.” He led Fall into a pitch-black corridor. Their footsteps echoed from invisible walls as they went down a curving stairwell. Two men dressed in long, dark robes and the traditional Uzbek skullcaps stood at the bottom. They embraced Kirov and bowed toward Fall, then gestured to rugs on the floor.

  “They speak the Tajik language,” Kirov said. “They have been caretakers here for years.” The men looked like the Tajiks Fall had seen in Tashkent. Their strong, aquiline faces reminded him of profiles carved into an old Persian frieze.

  A fire burned in a hearth with a chimney. “We will eat now,” Kirov said. “It is the custom here to feed guests at once after their trip through the desert.”

  The man near the hearth filled bowls with carrots and cabbage floating in a thick lamb broth. As they ate, Kirov closed his eyes to conceal his joy. It took several moments to regain his composure. Respecting his mood, the caretakers ate in silence.

  After their noisy ride, Fall welcomed the silence. Leaning back against a wall, he felt his attention coming to a steady focus. A presence had formed in this place, he thought, that made meditation easier. Softening his gaze, he saw flecks of light in his bowl. Then an image of Atabet, his skin swimming in a strange luminescence. Closing his eyes, he felt an odd elasticity . . .

  “Darwin,” Kirov whispered. “I am sorry to hurry you, but we have a long night ahead.”

  Startled, Fall looked up. The two caretakers had cleared away the bowls.

  Kirov’s blue eyes sparkled. “It is easy to fall into reverie here,” he said. “The baraka is strong. But come. I will show you a place to sleep.”

  They went down another stairwell, Kirov holding a torch. Parts of the building were built of stone, while others were hollowed through unsupported earth.

  “Are we under the mosque now?” Fall whispered.

  “The building upstairs is built on this one,” Kirov answered, his voice echoing in the narrow passage. “This part of the place was built in the days of Tamerlane, in the fourteenth or fifteenth century.”

  The passage turned left into a long stone vault. Kirov held the lamp to the walls. “You see these inscriptions?” He pointed to rows of Arabic letters. “They are the names and dates of people buried here. This place is called a mazar, a burial vault for members of our school. Some of these tombs were built in the eleventh century.”

  The inscriptions ran along the wall for several hundred feet. Kirov pointed to the ceiling. “They are buried all the way to the top, some of them the bones of saints. Their presence reminds us that we have many helpers on the Way.”

  They walked in silence along the catacomb, then stopped beside a beautifully carved inscription. “Ali Shirazi,” Kirov whispered. “I carved this nineteen years ago.”

  The headstone was smaller than the others. Under Shirazi’s name were three lines of Arabic letters. “What does it say?” Fall asked as Kirov touched the carving.

  “Nur wujudi dha ib. Nur wujudi jamid. Tajdid al-khalq. Sayings he liked to use. ‘Both souls and bodies are made of the same holy light, and they will become one in the New Creation.’ ” Kirov pressed his forehead to the rock, whispering a sentence in Russian. Then he turned abruptly and led Fall out of the vault.

  They went down another stairwell. By now, Fall guessed, they were eighty or ninety feet below the courtyard. They entered a room with a small wooden cot. “You will sleep here,” Kirov said, lighting a second lamp. “I will show you where to wash tomorrow. The driver brought your bag and blankets, but don’t go to bed. There is more to see.”

  Fall looked around the cell. Its stone walls had a subtle iridescence. He opened his suitcase and found a fur cap, then sat to enjoy the silence. There was a second depth within this earthen cellar, a presence even more profound than the one he had felt before . . .

  When he looked up, Kirov stood at the entrance. “We will give you a tour,” he said. “Free of charge. Our guide is waiting.”

  Fall felt reluctant to leave this pleasurable stillness. He rose slowly, trying to preserve it. “Watch your step,” Kirov said. “The passage will get steeper.”

  They were moving down an incline, past more doors and arches. “This place must have been enormous!” Fall exclaimed.

  “Not in circumference,” Kirov answered, “but in depth. It goes down, as you can see, into places even older.” Their guide’s lamp cast twisting shadows on the wall and brightened the glistening surface of the stones.

  The passage now turned left, and before them stood a huge stone door. Two megaliths some eight feet tall supported a massive lintel, a structure that might have come from Stonehenge, Fall thought. It looked like the entrance to a temple. “The second mosque, the one from Tamerlane’s time, was built on this,” Kirov said. “The Bureau of Antiquities knows nothing about it. Watch the ground when you enter. There are holes you might fall into.”

  The guide led them into a cavern. “Wait,” Kirov whispered. “I want you to gather your senses. He is going to show us something.”

  Kirov waited for Fall’s breathing to subside. “Now,” he said. “Turn around and see it.”

  In the first shock of surprise, Fall saw a light more vivid than the lamp. A sun was embedded in the earth, rising through a city. There was no doubt it was Atabet’s painting. One detail stood out at once—a thin, gray line bisecting the picture diagonally to form an X with the city’s slope. The X seemed to cancel the scene, just as in Atabet’s version. Fall stepped closer. The parapets and towers of the city in the mosaic differed in detail from the buildings on San Francisco’s Russian Hill, but their contours and textures were the same. “I see why you brought me,” he whispered.

  Fall gazed at the throbbing sun, deadly in its pale splendor. What was it meant to suggest?

  “There are several stories about it,” Kirov said, replying to the unspoken question. “One says it is a place for human souls to pass between the worlds. Near it, the elements reconstitute themselves more freely, and a few have gotten powers of the jinn. But another legend says that this is the sun that will rise in the west. The sun at the end of our age. It will rise as the earth is setting in the world of Hurqalya. As you will see, there was a school here older than Islam. I think the legend comes from that. It could be Zoroastrian, or Vedic, or older still. It might come from the Stone Age.”

  “Did the Vedic rishis come here?”

  “One legend says so, but we know so little about them. But what is that sun about to do? Is it rising through the city?” Kirov’s face had an ageless quality in the flickering light. “And what is that city? Do you see it might be made of living cells?”

  “You’re right,” Fall said. “It’s just like Atabet’s painting. That city, he says, is like a thing he sees in trance, the body as it might be.”

  Kirov whistled to set up an echo. “This cavern is immense,” he said. “When I was a boy I came here to chant. My grandfather was a master of the zikhr and taught us to use the place like a musical instrument. He called it Seraphiel’s trumpet. But come, I have another thing to show you.”

  Their guide led them out of the cavern and down another incline. “These caves,” Kirov said, “were escape tunnels for the buildings above. As the surrounding valley filled with desert sand, new floors were added continually. The place is a tower in the ground.” They heard trickling water. “There are springs down here. And an underground river. But here is what we came to see.”

  They had come to the edge of an abyss some twenty feet wide. It dropped away beyond the lamplight. “This is the Well of Light,” Kirov said. “Initiates have practiced here for thousands of years.”

  “How far down does it go?”

  “No one has reached the bottom. The walls are too slippery, and there is no place from which to lower a rope safely more than forty or fifty meters. Tomorrow we will test its depth with our minds.”

  Walking up the incline, Fall began to tremble. The intensity he felt in these caves was no longer pleasurable. Their immensity was becomin
g oppressive. Inside his cell, he tried to control himself. The crucial thing was to remember the quiet surrender he had learned from Atabet. If anxiety threatened to overwhelm him, eventually it would pass. If his boundaries vanished in this darkness, his essential identity would not. He let his fears present themselves as familiar voices: he might fall, he might faint, he might suffocate, he might panic. His body might fly apart. With a shudder, he remembered a vision of a huge black bird plucking his organs out, a vision from the month he had begun meditation. And the memory of his fall from a cliff near San Francisco, to survive with just scratches and bruises. Images of disaster came and went until he was almost asleep.

  It was midnight. Blowing out the lamp, he lay on the cot and pulled the blankets around him. For the next five hours he slept fitfully, with odd dreams: scenes of Prague and Moscow, of airport inspectors taking his bags away, of Aitmatov leading him into a Kremlin hall. Was Leonid Brezhnev trying to show them the secret of the Hammer and Sickle?

  “Time to get up.” Kirov was gently shaking him.

  Rising stiffly, he followed Kirov up the narrow stairs. In a damp room off the courtyard, he washed his face until he was fully awake. Then they went down to the room with a stove, where the men who had made them dinner brewed a strong green tea. “Drink two cups,” Kirov said. “We will stay down there for about three hours.”

  Though his body felt heavy and stiff, Fall sensed energy gathering—a force that could turn into fear. He drank the bitter tea and stamped his feet nervously. All would be well, he told himself, if he remembered that anxiety would pass. Kirov smiled encouragement, but said nothing as they started down toward the well.

  Descending slowly, they reached the megalithic gate. As they passed it, Fall saw a feature he had missed before: a shining star between two animal horns carved on the massive lintel. It looked like Islam’s Star and Crescent but might have been a Bronze Age symbol of the sun and bull. Did the glowing mosaic inside reveal this ancient joining of earth and heaven?