The Year of Broken Glass

by Joe Denham

  Horace Maynard, the son of a land baron in England, was old, old money. I recall him actually saying to me around the time we first met that he’d come to Victoria to get a taste of the colonies, as if Canada’s ties to England were anything more than those of history and formality; as though the Empire of the world was still British and not American. Horace was an idiot, but a rich one and a loveable one in his well-bred, benevolent arrogance. He considered himself a philanthropist, and so I easily convinced him in the mid-90s to buy a very expensive waterfront acreage south of Tofino where we built the Glass Globe beach house, a small and outrageous-looking accommodation (thanks to Horace’s flair for innovative design). The idea was to offer it as a free residence for scientists and journalists, academics and artists, and whoever else was working for the betterment of the world’s oceans, which we did; and to rent it as a short-term bed-and-breakfast accommodation to the tourists through the summer months, the proceeds of which were to be donated to Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd and the like.

  Not long after the Glass Globe was built, Horace and I bought my mother’s old family estate in southern France from the family who’d owned it since my grandfather passed on. It was there we wintered most of our eleven years together; there we had a grand swimming pool built and housed in glass on the Mediterranean shore. And it was in that pool, filled with the fresh sea water we had pumped in to avoid the fish-killing chemicals used in conventional pools, that Horace had an aneurysm and drowned.

  So I’ve lived alone in what was once our modest summer residence at the Glass Globe for almost five years now. In that time I’ve had some exceptional company—I’ve shared a table with Sylvia Earle and Tim Flannery, David Suzuki and Robert Kennedy Jr.—but as I idle past the breakwater at Schooner Cove, all the while cursing Horace for insisting on the purchase of such a large, impractical boat, it’s one particular conversation with one particular guest that I can’t keep from flooding my thoughts.

  It’s been over a decade now since the Children of Mu, a little motley group of characters obsessed with the life and ideas of a man by the name of James Churchward, first descended upon the Glass Globe for a week-long convention. I have only a very peripheral knowledge of Churchward and his ideas, gleaned from the many lectures I received over dinners with Horace. He and the leader of this group, Monsieur Arnault Vericombe, were kindred spirits, and the friendship they immediately fell into inspired my husband to become enamoured with Churchward’s life and his theories of Mu.

  As a young soldier in the British Army, Churchward was sent to India during the famine of the 1880s. There he fell in with a rishi at a local temple and, in the off-hours of his army duty, he studied an ancient language which the rishi claimed was the original language of mankind and originated in a place he called Mu, a continental landmass the size of South America which supposedly sank beneath the Pacific Ocean twenty thousand years ago in a storm of fire and water; the Atlantis of the Pacific, essentially.

  At some point during this affiliation, Churchward’s story goes, the rishi produced from the vaults of the temple a number of clay tablets brought to India between twenty and fifty thousand years ago by explorers and colonials of the Naacal, the civilized people of Mu, more advanced in their arts, sciences, technologies and religion than those of Churchward’s time. Purportedly, Churchward and the rishi worked tirelessly at the deciphering and translating of these tablets, and it’s upon these that all Churchward’s subsequent theories and writings were based. Of course, he never produced these tablets or his rishi mentor as supporting evidence, but he insisted that the many discoveries he made circumnavigating the globe in search of further signs and artifacts of Mu substantiated his claims.

  Following his travels, Churchward settled in New York and became a very rich and successful inventor and entrepreneur. Horace mentioned once that Churchward held over thirty patents in the United States, several of which were the first alloys of titanium, chromium, manganese, nickel and steel: stainless steel. I often thought that, aside from his friendship with Arnault, it was Churchward’s adventurous and innovative mind and spirit that so engaged my husband, not the elaborate and outrageous claims Churchward put forth in the five volumes he wrote on Mu and the Naacal in the later years of his life.

  Successful entrepreneur or not, Churchward was a quack. Aside from insisting upon the overnight sinking of a continental landmass, he also made various outlandish claims of the Naacal’s pervasive influence on subsequent human civilizations and religions the world over. He asserted, for instance, that Jesus’s lost years were spent studying with the elusive Naacal Brotherhood, the keepers of the ancient religion, in the mountains of Tibet. Of course, all his claims are soundly debunked by the most basic archaeological, geological and genetic sciences of today. But that hasn’t stopped Churchward’s books from being in print nearly a century after he penned them, and it hasn’t dampened the beliefs of Arnault Vericombe and the like.

  Shortly after Horace’s passing, Arnault again brought his band of “Muologists” to the Glass Globe for another convention. At first I thought he’d done so as an excuse to check up on me, and I wondered if Horace had asked him to do as much in the event of his passing. Arnault and I had never been close, but he lingered in my home each evening well past dinner, well after all the other guests had retired to the beach house. We reminisced about Horace the first few evenings over wine. Once that wore thin, Arnault began finding or creating seemingly random topics of conversation to carry our evenings along, which led me to wonder whether his interest in me was in fact of the romantic nature. If it was, he never made his feelings or intentions the least bit explicit.

  Regardless, his last night with me Arnault told the most outlandish story, one that I thought at the time he had most certainly dreamt up while lying alone in his bed down at the beach house, pining, listening to the Pacific break against the shore in the near-distance below. Now I’m not so certain in my skepticism. As I motor by Parksville, hugging the shore on a track line north to Lambert Channel and through to Reid Island, surveying from the sea the damage I’ve just recently viewed from the sky, there’s a crack opening in the wall of reason and doubt I built between myself and Arnault’s fantastical tale of glass floats, magical fish and mountains of fire. A crack just wide enough for me to slip through as I turn the boat ninety degrees eastward and set course instead for Lasqueti Island.

  I’M LYING IN a bed of lambskins listening to the wind’s light breath in the high branches above me. Fairwin’ has fallen asleep at the far end of his fort and he makes no noise.

  Earlier in the day I motored around the bottom end of Lasqueti, up Bull Pass, and dropped anchor in Boho Bay, a bit southeast of Mount Tremeton, the safest place I could think to leave the Belle, stern-tied and locked up tight. I imagine False Bay, with its band of dockside boozers and petty crooks, to be a less than wise place to leave a boat such as the Belle at the best of times: under the current anarchic circumstances, I may as well hang a Take Me sign from the taffrail.

  It took much longer than I thought it would to hike up here from the boat, the dirt roads empty, not even the occasional truck passing by. Fairwin’ tells me this is to be expected, Lasqueti being so sparsely populated and Lasquetians, in general, especially those living south of False Bay, being of the homebody type who rarely venture off their acreages. So I arrived in the dimness of last light, the trail up a tricky negotiation in the dense darkness of the forest at dusk. Fairwin’ behaved as though he’d been expecting me as I finished climbing the irregularly spaced treads of his winding staircase and entered his home. He served me a bowl of bland, though hearty, kale and lamb soup and we talked of the earthquake for a short time as we ate. After our meal, Fairwin’ shuttered his glassless windows and blew all the candles out, so the night’s dark is absolute. Coupled with a silence punctuated only by the wind’s occasional and very light gusting, it makes remembering my conversation with Arnault Vericombe as effortless as dreaming.

  He and I were
sitting in my living room when he told me the myth of the Sohqui. It was late in the summer, cricket song ringing through the open windows from the tall grasses beyond my house. We had been sharing the last of a bottle of sherry and discussing the recent re-election of Bush and Cheney when Arnault got up and crossed the room to the front entranceway. He took from his coat pocket a piece of paper that he unrolled as he walked back and sat down on the couch beside me. On the paper were dozens of symbols, I assumed drawn by Arnault himself, which he explained were taken from Churchward’s third volume, The Sacred Symbols of Mu.

  “This one,” Arnault explained, pointing to a pencil drawing of a seven-headed serpent, “is the Naacal symbol for creation and the creator. This one,” he continued, pointing to an image which looked to me like the birds-eye view of a four-bladed helicopter prop, “symbolizes the creator’s four sacred commands. These other symbols comprise the Naacal’s hieratic alphabet. And this one we’ve only recently discovered the meaning of,” he said as he turned the piece of paper over. On its backside was a drawing of a fish with a three-finned tail, almost identical to that which is embossed on Ferris’s float.

  “Have you ever seen a float with this image on it, Miriam?” he asked. At the time of course I had not, though I told him the recent rumour of certain floats being bought for considerable sums of money, all of them with unusual, unknown markings. I couldn’t tell if his reaction to this was one of relief or disappointment, but regardless, his mood thickened. When he asked if it could be trusted that what he was about to tell me would always and only stay between us, I almost answered no. It was late, I was already tired from our week of long evenings together, and was thinking I might prefer to have a hot bath, curl up in bed with Poseidon, and listen to the crickets. But instead I said yes, and Arnault began.

  “This image was first discovered many years ago by Augustus Le Plongeon, a contemporary and friend of James Churchward’s who worked tirelessly on the deciphering of tablets he found in the Yucatan,” Arnault explained, pointing again to the drawing of the fish with the three-finned tail. “More recently, some Naacal tablets were found on the Marquesas, once some of the high mountain peaks of Mu, which have finally shed light upon what this image represents.”

  He went on to tell me the myth of a wondrous sea creature called the Sohqui (as in, sew-key), a fish the size of a right whale with the whiskered head of a tuna, a long, scaly body, and a three-finned tail. According to the legend, the Sohqui was a deep-sea creature living in the dark saline waters at the bottom of what was then the ocean floor off the east coast of Mu and is now the Mariana Trench. They were translucent, as the only time light touched their bodies was on full moon nights when, drawn by the pull and shine of the moon, the Sohqui would surface. On such nights a fleet of fishermen would await them. It was believed the Sohqui’s oil brought virility, strength and longevity to anyone who ingested it, so it was the most precious of commodities, the gold of the Naacal. Anyone supplying the emperor enjoyed the full favour of his court and vast lands and riches as a reward.

  To catch the fish, the Naacal fishermen set long lines of glass floats upon the surface of the water to attract the Sohqui with the moonlight reflected within. The fish would open their great gullets and attempt to swallow the floats, at which time the fishermen would unleash their spears upon them. Apparently, the tablets tell of a golden time in Mu when the Sohqui were plentiful and the Naacal and their emperor lived long and healthy lives, prospering on the flesh and oil of the abundant fish. Then the Sohqui began to decline, and the civilization began its decline concurrently, until the last Sohqui was killed.

  Arnault went on to explain how the last Sohqui, a massive old fish said to be the original mother of all those taken by the Naacal before her, swallowed the float of glass which had attracted her to the surface and swam back down to the depths with it and several spears plunged into her side. This is when the earth shook and erupted a volcanic storm of fire, and the waters rose and buried Mu beneath fifty million square miles of sea. The Sohqui died there at the bottom of the Mariana Trench, and over many years the glass float lay trapped in its carcass of bones, both glass and bone preserved by a coating of the coveted oil. Eventually the float drifted free and floated up to the ocean surface, where it has drifted the world over for some twenty thousand years.

  Since that time, Arnault insisted the tablets said, the very fisherman who set the float of glass upon the moonlit water and drove his spears into the last Sohqui’s side has lived immortally upon the earth, cursed to seek out the float, smash it to pieces, and cast them into the conduit of the Mauna Kea, the highest volcanic mountain of Mu and that of the greatest vertical elevation, if measured from the ocean floor—which was, according to the legend, once the sea-level land of Mu—on earth. It is said upon the tablets (here Arnault appealed to my knowledge of industrial overfishing, of coral bleaching and acidification, of the great auk and the whales) that until that float is found, broken and cast into the mountain, the oceans will be caught in the throes of an exponential extinction crisis that will eventually threaten the very ability of humans to survive on earth.

  I didn’t know then whether to laugh at the absurdity of Arnault’s tale or applaud his gifted imagination. I assumed he’d seen a picture of one of the rare fishing floats of the like Ferris Wishbone has now found, and had subsequently woven it into the stuff of his life’s obsession, the Lost Land of Mu, to create his fantastical tale. I’ve half-expected to receive notice of Arnault’s book these past few years, Sohqui and the Oil of Immortality: Why the Continent of Mu Was Lost, and I’ve kept him off my spam list just to keep tabs on his activities.

  That night, as I considered what my response might be to all this in the awkward silence that followed Arnault’s outpouring of the myth, I remember noticing suddenly that the crickets had stopped their singing. The silence wasn’t only awkward, it was complete. This seemed, at the time, to lend a particular weight to the evening and to Arnault’s telling, and it inspired in me a fleeting but undeniable feeling that Arnault’s tale might, in fact, be less of a fiction than I’d been thinking while listening to him tell it.

  “If you ever find or hear of a float that bears any of these symbols upon it, Miriam,” Arnault said, “contact me without delay.” He put the piece of paper with the many drawings in my hand. “There are those who, knowing too of the myth, would rather the float remain unfound. Or if found, unbroken, so as to keep the curse intact.”

  It was with this claim that I could no longer contain myself, and I burst through Arnault’s gravely serious tone with a near-hysterical fit of laughter. Poor Arnault. After all that, to feel the compulsion to cap it off with the suggestion of some conspiracy theory. Though as he rose and left me on the couch, doubled over Poseidon on my lap, it seemed it was him who pitied me.

  Shortly after I used the piece of paper he’d given me as fire starter, and I’ve thought nothing of it since. For a moment it crossed my mind when Ferris first revealed his find, and I thought fleetingly that I might call Arnault as he’d requested. But really I’ve always considered him a kook, much like my dear third husband, a man born of great wealth who was never forced to grow beyond his childhood daydreams and flights of fancy. I imagined Arnault insisting that he come to see the float before anyone else is contacted, and then further dragging the whole thing into some fantastical and ludicrous scenario. I knew that even if I, out of some respect for the friendship he once shared with Horace, had the patience for such things, a young and eager man like Ferris most probably would not.

  Now I’m lying here remembering the thick black clouds of ash hovering over the Cascades today, ash that is probably by now falling on the forest around me, and I can’t help but consider the coincidence. Fish float found, fire in the sky. One of the particulars Arnault had told me about his magic fishing float of Mu was that it could not, in any way, be broken by anything or anyone other than he who had created and set it out upon the water, the killer of the last Sohqui. The
myth said that he was to find it, and take it from the sea, and that when he did he was to break it and throw it to the depths of the Mauna Kea immediately. Arnault claimed further that if this were to not happen, if it were to be lost or waylaid, or to fall somehow into the wrong hands, that a fury of fire and water of the magnitude that took Mu and the Naacal to the ocean’s depths would again be set upon the earth.

  There’s something about this fort, about this creepy island, full as it undoubtedly is of individuals living beyond what is generally considered sanity (I’ve heard Lasqueti referred to a number of times as the “open-aired asylum”), that makes fertile ground for such far-fetched thoughts. But Ferris’s rendezvous was set for noon, and there’s no way he could have made the exchange beforehand… unless he sold it elsewhere or had it stolen from him. Both unlikely, which leaves two options. Either Arnault’s tale is true and the float possesses some conscious power to pre-emptively conjure a catastrophic earthquake in order to avoid being given over into the wrong hands, or Arnault’s story is, as I’m inclined to think, hogwash. But still there is that sense in me that there may be some truth to the myth Arnault told me so many years ago. Which is why I’m here in Fairwin’s fort, waiting for sleep to take me and carry me into tomorrow, resolved as I am now to break my vow of secrecy to Arnault and tell Fairwin’ the story of the Sohqui and the float, so he will leave with me on the Princess Belle at first light to go search for Ferris Wishbone.

  •

  When I wake, dawn light pixelating through the shutters, it’s with a sense of renewal and foreboding both, and I know this upheaval of my life brought on by the earth’s is altering my sense of things, making me take and consider actions that are perhaps against my better judgment. I lie in my warm bed of lamb pelts as Fairwin’ lights a candle and his little cookstove, then pours water from a large brass urn into a glass pot, setting it on the stovetop. He starts in on some strange form of stand-in-place qigong, all he would have room for amidst the clutter, patting and slapping himself up and down his body, rapping on the back of his head, his fingers tapping on his closed eyelids, all the while breathing ferociously. Then he settles back into an open-armed stance, like he’s holding a large ball to his chest. His breathing eases to inaudible and I close my eyes again, not prepared yet to abandon the luxury of my nest for the bareness of the coming day, and think instead of Ferris.