The 22 Letters

by King, Clive; Kennedy, Richard;

  After the cloud, and the shock waves, came the sound, and this was like all the thunderstorms a man might hear in his lifetime, rolled together in one incredible moment.

  Below, the face of the sea was almost indistinguishable in the darkness, but if anyone had eyes left to see and mind to register, there was still enough light from the eastern sky to see the next messenger from the cataclysm in the west. At first a line of white foam detaching itself from the black horizon, it revealed itself as a gigantic wave rushing with unbelievable speed toward the coast. It seemed to break, to those whose horrified eyes took in the sight, not against the rocks of the shore but against the very slopes of the mountain range, so that the watchers had a mad fear that it would climb and wash them from the hilltops where they lay. The city of Gebal was lost in a smother of darkness and foam, like a child’s sand castles swept by the advancing tide.

  Then the wind reached them. The Giblites pressed themselves against the rocks, fearing to be lifted and hurled into nothingness by its force, which was indeed the fate of many who were on exposed crags and peaks. In the pine belt, the trees lay down once before the blast, and did not rise again; they had been uprooted or snapped off short in their thousands. The wind continued unabated, and spread the black cloud across the sky even to the farthest East. And after that all sense of time was lost; no one could tell when the darkness of day passed to the darkness of night, no one indeed could ever say whether it was for only one night, or two, or many, that the survivors of Gebal clung helpless to the mountainside while chaos returned to the waters and the firmament, and all light was extinguished save a ghastly red glow from the West that had nothing to do with the sun.

  Beth opened her eyes. She saw a gray world—gray skies, a gray sea, gray ashes falling from the sky and covering the rocks. There were other forms around her, stirring from what might be sleep.

  She tried her tongue: “We are alive!” she said doubtfully.

  “Are we?” came a voice. It sounded like one of her brothers.

  “Impossible!” said another voice. It sounded like her father’s.

  She rubbed the sleep and the ashes from her eyes.

  “Father! Nun! Zayin!” she said. Three other forms sat up, and a fourth, which she recognized as the Chaldean’s.

  “We have been sleeping,” said Beth. “Wake up! We are alive.”

  “How can you be sure?” asked Resh, his voice also full of doubt.

  “I am here. You are here. Nun and Zayin, we are here, aren’t we?” Beth said.

  Resh tried to collect his wits. “But what use is there in being alive, when the world has come to an end?”

  A great sadness came over Beth. “Has the world ended, Father?” she asked.

  “Surely it did,” Resh said. “Is not this the afterworld, where spirits eat mud and ashes?”

  Beth recognized that part of her sadness was only hunger. “Eat, did you say, Father? Are you hungry? I am, but we brought food from—” She did not want to say, “From the world.” “We brought food. Here!” she rummaged in a bundle lying near. “Cheese, and olives. And bread—see, it is quite fresh, as if it was baked yesterday. Yesterday! Is that possible?”

  “Certainly it was in another world that it was baked,” said Resh. “But let us eat. Zayin? Nun? It is well we took food with us to the afterworld. We need not eat earth yet.”

  Zayin accepted the food, but he was standing up and looking around him as he ate.

  “What is this talk of the afterworld?” he said at last. “It seems to me that this is the side of the mountain above Gebal where we came before—” He could not finish the sentence. “Look, here are the people of Gebal around us. There are my soldiers. Wherever we are, we are not alone.”

  They realized that other families were stirring round them; people were talking in low voices, babies were crying, children were calling for food and water.

  “All souls that ever lived meet in the afterworld,” muttered Resh. “We cannot expect to be alone.”

  “My body feels as it did,” Zayin said musingly. “I feel—I feel that this body should ache with pain, with the blows it has suffered. But I feel well. More bread, if you have it, please, Beth! I am certainly thirsty. We must find water.”

  Then Nun spoke. “Zayin, Zayin, what of the armies, the invaders? And what of the city?”

  Zayin struck his head. “Ah! If the world has not ended, what is happening there? Our city!” He strode to the edge of the slope and looked down. They waited in suspense until he returned the short distance.

  “Well?” asked Nun.

  Zayin’s voice in reply sounded distant, baffled. “I can make nothing of this gray world and gray sea. And the ashes!”

  “The city, man, the city!” repeated Nun. “Is it still there?”

  “Yes,” replied Zayin, sitting down and taking another mouthful. “It is still there. But it seems—dead.”

  “The world is dead,” said Resh. “It came to an end.”

  “I think I am alive,” said Nun. “I know this bread, cheese, and olives are delicious. Have we survived—survived whatever it was that happened, and are we to go on living in a dead world? Chaldean, eat, pray! Prove that you, too, are alive. But tell us. Tell us what happened!”

  Just then a Giblite came over from another group, carrying a waterskin. “We have water to spare, Resh and sons of Resh. Drink, I pray you. And tell us what we are to do, for no one knows.”

  They thanked him, drank, then Nun turned again to the Chaldean. “You who foretold the future, interpret to us poor ignorant ones who cannot rightly remember the past or understand the present. Tell us what happened, then perhaps we shall know what we must do next.”

  The Chaldean finished eating, drank, and began to speak slowly. “To explain the present may be harder than to foretell the future. To decide what to do is always hardest. You say I foretold what has happened. Indeed, what I read in the stars, together with a voice within me, my foreboding, predicted a great calamity. The stars suggested a time. I traveled until I felt I had found the place. Nun the Seafarer, you will remember the island north of Crete?”

  “The island without water, where they entertained us with wine and told of the buried Giants?” said Nun. “Thira. Can I ever forget it?”

  “That was the place,” said the Chaldean.

  “Then their story of the Giants was true?” asked Nun, beginning to understand.

  “Certain it is that, buried beneath the crust of earth we live on, lie forces that were free at the beginning of time and are now imprisoned, call them Giants, monsters, Titans if you wish.”

  “And from this place,” said Nun, “they escaped?”

  “That is what I believe must have happened,” said the sage. “If ever you voyage again to the isles of the west, do not look to be entertained again by our former hosts. My vision tells me that they were burned, by the first great outbreak of heat, into the ashes which are now falling over the world. Do not even look for the mountain of Thira. It, too, was consumed in an instant, and you will not see it again.”

  The listeners were silent for a while, trying to comprehend the disintegration of a mountain. Then Nun spoke.

  “The sign, Chaldean, what of that? The waters receded from the shore before our eyes, and you said that was the sign for the destruction to begin. Where did the waters go?”

  “Who can say?” replied the Chaldean. “But we know when the earth quakes, great chasms may appear in the land. May not this happen under the sea? May not the waters of the sea pour down such gulfs until they encounter the unquenchable fire of the underworld? Then, when one inexhaustible element meets another—what struggles must follow, what release of inconceivable forces?”

  “Speak to us of Giants,” said Zayin. “I cannot understand your philosophy of elements and forces. But a Giant we saw, a Giant in the form of a cloud, rising in the west. I can
believe that the Giants have escaped and conquered the world. Tell us, Chaldean, are all the kingdoms of the earth destroyed?”

  The sage’s eyes took on a distant look as if he were trying to see beyond the gray horizon. “For great Knossos, court of proud Minos, the destruction I foretold must have come to pass—yet Knossos, among its mountains, may rise again. Mallia and the cities of the Cretan coast have been overwhelmed, and for all its great wealth Crete cannot remain a power among nations for long. We all beheld the great waves that sped across the sea from the central eruption, like ripples from a stone cast into a pool. Wherever these reached the shore, the dwellers on the coast must have been swept away—”

  “The armies!” cried Zayin. “Our enemies that were marching from north and south to attack us! They must have been carried away like ants in a torrent!”

  “The Cretan navies too,” said Nun. “They are certainly destroyed. No ships could have lived in that sea.” He paused, and then added, “Our ships in harbor too. What can be left of them? And our city? Before we rejoice over our enemies, Zayin, let us know what is left for us to rejoice over. Chaldean, you say that even Knossos may rise again. This is not the end of all things, then?”

  “The end of all things? No,” replied the Chaldean. “In my country and in Upper Egypt it may be that they have only looked upon this darkness and wondered. By the same token, I must soon return to my own people and relate these disasters.”

  “But what of our future?” said Nun. “Will you not prophesy for us? Is the nation of Gebal to rise again, or are we to die here on this ravaged mountainside? What do the heavens hold in store for us?”

  “How can I read the secrets of the heavens, when night and day they are still wrapped in the clouds of this catastrophe?” asked the sage. Then he rose to his feet and looked at the group of Giblites that had gathered around him, and went on. “Nevertheless, I shall speak of your future—what any child among you could speak. People of Gebal, if you sit here on this mountainside and do nothing, you will surely die. If you descend to your city, to your farms, and your shipyards, you will find your buildings overthrown, your crops and orchards devastated, your ships smashed to pieces. You may wish then that you had been wiped out on the first day of this calamity. You may feel that you might as well have stayed to starve on the mountain. But mankind is not so easily released from its penance, its commitment to toiling, striving, building. You may have to start from your beginnings again, fashioning your simplest tools from what you have to hand, like the most primitive tribes. Yet, one advantage you do have over primitive peoples. Your material possessions may be lost, your written records destroyed, but each of you carries in his mind the patterns of your civilization. And you may learn from this disaster that what you carry in your minds is of far greater value than your material possessions. General Zayin, you have only a remnant of your armies, your military stores may be destroyed, your sources of armaments cut off—yet who knows, the future may see the armies of your nation crossing deserts and mountains in lands you have not yet heard of, if its leaders retain the spark of military imagination I discern in you, though the gods know I am no man of war. Nun, Captain of Ships, I fear you have no ships now to command, and your very harbor and shipyards may be unusable. But a few generations to come may see ships from this coast penetrating to unknown shores and islands, to seas which at present have no name, thanks to the skills of navigation which now exist in your mind alone.”

  The prophet’s gaze fell on the face of Beth, solemn and open-eyed, and he permitted himself a gentle smile. “Even your daughters, people of the coast, show signs that they may be the forebears of queens who shall become legendary in times to come for their wit and wisdom.” Beth blushed and smiled back shyly, and the Chaldean’s eyes wandered over the rest of the assembly. “Bear witness, Giblites, I read this not in the stars but in your minds and faces. And, indeed, there may be one among you, whose face I do not know, and who carries in his mind a secret of even greater worth, a secret seed that, planted here and now, may grow and spread over the face of the earth, beyond the farthest marches of your armies or the longest voyages of your ships. And this seed may be something which seems at present no more important than a childish game—”

  And, unaware that she was doing so, Beth spoke aloud. “Like the twenty-two letters! I wonder where Aleph is.”

  A traveler was descending the slopes of the mountain above Gebal. He had passed through the belt of the cedar forest, and had observed with wonder and dismay the tangle of uprooted trunks and splintered limbs. Only the smallest seedlings and most pliant saplings were still growing, with a few ancient trees of great girth and low growth in sheltered places. He lingered for a time in a clearing where trees had been felled some time ago by the hands of men and still lay waiting to be carried away; then he continued on down a track until he came to a place of bare rocks. Here there were great wounds in the side of the mountain, where crags had been torn away and left raw, red unweathered rock behind. He came to the pines. Every one of them lay flat against the ground, their tops pointing away from the West. The traveler closed his eyes: he was faint from hunger, and his head swam in the hot sun. He listened to the sounds of the pine wood: the cicadas sang their senseless song, just as he remembered it, among the withering branches, but he missed the music of the wind that used to play in the swaying pine-tops.

  The traveler’s heart was full of dread and his body was very weary after much solitary journeying and great privation, but he forced himself on toward the city. He came to a point where he knew he would be able to look down on Gebal, but he was afraid of what he might see, or fail to see. He reached the edge of the rocks and looked down. Hundreds of feet below in the sun’s glare, the promontory of Gebal could be clearly seen. To the right, the blue indentation of the harbor was as it used to be. The traveler screwed up his eyes and blinked, trying to interpret what he saw; the outlines of the city wall, the palace, the temples, and the houses seemed to be just as he remembered them. His heart lifted with relief—and then he began to distinguish what was lacking from the remembered picture. The neat nutshell hulls of boats were missing from the harbor. The rectangle of the palace was not sharp and bold as it had been. It was perhaps only the empty husk of a building. And, try as he might, he could not make out any sign of life. He tried to convince himself that he was still too high to distinguish human figures. He did not wish to think he was looking down on a deserted city.

  He felt he must keep going, or he would collapse from weariness. He came to the olive orchards. They, too, were bare, splintered, stripped of their leaves and fruit, though the gnarled black trunks and roots still seemed to clutch the rocky soil. As he reached the lower terraces, the walls of which were all scattered and crumbled, he thought his exhaustion was playing tricks with his senses. It was still half an hour’s walk to the harbor or the shore—yet there was a ship, wrecked in a tangle of olive trunks, its anchor cable trailing out behind it through a plantation where the stumps of fig trees were swathed in rotting seaweed.

  The sun was setting now beyond the city. Every sunset since the time of the darkness had colored the whole sky with flaring hues of red, orange, and violet, and so it was this evening. But the traveler did not stop to admire them. He must reach the city before dark. If he could encounter seagoing ships in an olive orchard in broad daylight, he was afraid to think what he might see in the city after nightfall. A people of ghosts?

  Picking his way in the gathering dusk over pebbles, sea sand, and rotting weed he approached the city walls. They still stood high and black against the sky, but their tops were jagged and crumbled like the walls of a ruin. At the landward gate, two soldiers barred his way. They were gaunt and famine-stricken, living specters—but they were living.

  “Who goes there?” came the challenge. “We admit no strangers to Gebal. We’ve scarce enough to keep ourselves alive.”

  “I have come a long way,” said the traveler
. “I am fainting with hunger.”

  “There’s no food here,” said the second soldier. “Be on your way, stranger!”

  “But I am a Giblite,” persisted the traveler.

  “A Giblite?” repeated the first soldier, coming close to the traveler to scan his face in the dusk. “I don’t recognize you. What’s your trade?”

  “I am a scribe,” said the traveler. “Apprentice scribe,” he corrected himself.

  “Gebal has no scribes,” said the second soldier curtly. “They all stayed with the High Priest and got drowned. I shouldn’t linger here, stranger! You might get skinned and eaten. There’s famine here.”

  The traveler leaned weakly against the stone of the great gate. “Who is left alive here?” he asked. “My father was Chief Mason, my brothers were General Zayin and Nun, the sailor.”

  The second soldier came near and examined the traveler’s face in the thickening light. “Lucky you got here before dark! We’ve no oil for lamps here, and we’d have made short work of you. I remember you, though. You’re old Resh’s son, aren’t you. Used to be tally clerk at the Temple. What’s the name? Aleph, isn’t it?”

  Aleph nodded. “Are they alive, my family?”

  “I reckon you’ll find them in the same place where you used to live,” said the soldier. “Mostly we’re living in the ruins of the old houses and digging around for what we can find. Come on in. Another mouth to feed, but I dare say they’ll be glad to see you.”

  Wearily, but with lightened heart, Aleph made his way through the rubble-filled, barely recognizable streets. On every side families were settling themselves for the night in makeshift tents or lean-to shacks propped against whatever walls were left standing. Some were sharing out meager rations of food, but everyone seemed subdued with the quietness of hunger and exhaustion. He even passed neighbors who smiled and saluted him wanly, unaware that he was returning from a long absence. He did not stop to tell his story.