Tales of Adventurers

by Geoffrey Household

  So we offered a third to the drivers and firemen, a third to the shunters, and a third to the stationmaster. No takers! Each wanted a half, and the other half to be divided.

  The property of the company, then? Delage, being legal-minded, agreed to this, but the engineers and shunters would not have it. They explained with superfluous precision their right to the grapes, and demanded whether a company which had, in the immortal phrase, neither soul to be saved nor backside to be kicked could in any way be held responsible for the vine’s luxuriance.

  It was, I think, one of the big men from the Resistance who at last proposed that we should analyze the problem more closely by counting the bunches to be divided. He was used to the open air and desired an excuse to return to it. He was very bored by the commission.

  The suggestion was ridiculous, but really we could think of nothing useful to do. So Grande Vitesse and Petite Vitesse were put to counting bunches, while we, the others, broke into groups, according to age and political inclination, up and down the yard. The heat was abominable. I sympathized with Eve. One heard the tempter merely by looking at those grapes. They were magnificent, and the last twenty-four hours had brought them to perfection.

  Between the shunters and the drivers the military were compelled to take a little promenade. As for us, the visitors, we argued courteously and from an academic point of view; but it was not difficult to see that strong words would be used if we permitted ourselves to take the affair seriously. The Resistance man had already described Mme. Delage to the General Manager in terms for which I had to persuade him to apologize.

  No one noticed the man with the wheelbarrow. He arrived unobtrusively. He was so much a part of France that one did not question his right to be in the railroad yard. He was a little old peasant, bent by labor in the fields, and with the long, gray mustache of an ancient Gaul. He was wheeling a barrow with a ladder on it.

  He stopped at the tower and looked benevolently at Grande Vitesse, who was on the roof counting bunches, and at Petite Vitesse, who was performing the feats of an acrobat through the window. He knew at once that their intentions were honest – they understood each other, those children of old France.

  “They are just right, my grapes!” said the ancient, rubbing his hands. “Ah, how I know you! You have not changed in the war.”

  And he patted the trunk of the vine as if to congratulate it upon so punctual a response to the season.

  He was quite unaffected by the crowd. I doubt if he even noticed us. Or perhaps he thought that we had come to watch. He had the face of a man who enjoys all the protection of his conscience and the law. I hastened to his side before everyone could speak at once.

  “Is it your vine?” I asked him.

  He sat down on the wheelbarrow and drew from his vast coat pocket a portfolio. The documents were imposing. They dated from the time of Napoleon III. Paper like that is not made nowadays. And he read them aloud, on and on – that the said Sieur Henri Duval sold to the railroad company the property as set forth in the accompanying schedule with all buildings and land and produce growing thereon with the exception of the said vine, and the said Sieur Henri Duval should have access at all times for the purpose of cultivating the said vine and the fruit of the said vine should belong to him and his heirs and assigns, and the said railroad company on their part –

  “I am François Duval, voyez-vous,” he declared, “son of Henri Duval, and I have here my birth certificate and copy of the will of Henri Duval.”

  “But it is plain the grapes are his!” grumbled Charles Cortal, who, you will remember, was a communist, and did not believe in private property. “Why worry about the damned documents? He can just as well leave them for us in the tower.”

  He shrugged his shoulders and strolled off to prepare Lulu for the road. We returned to Paris.

  Three Kings

  HE CRAWLED OUT of his sleeping bag and shivered in the Persian dawn until the sun rose in countable inches above the flat edge of the salt desert, and the temperature leapt up as if there were no atmosphere at all to soften the transition between night and day.

  It was a Martian, not an earthly landscape. In such barren immensity he was conscious of his truck, his only companion, as if he were seeing it from the air. It was an indiscernible brown spot at the foot of a brown mountain. There was no green by which its shape and unity could be remarked – and this in spite of the fact that a narrow channel of water roared between truck and mountain. The stream itself was barren. Bed and banks were smooth as those of an aqueduct. The speed of the water had cleaned the rock of every obstruction where gravel might accumulate and soil grow into life.

  He had intended, when he left Ispahan, to turn his back on that stream after filling his water tank, and to drive two hundred miles into the heart of the desert – an easy enough run over the baked, glistening surface, but foolhardy for a man alone. On foot and carrying water, the point of no return was fifty miles out; thus an injury, a breakdown or an unexpected patch of soft ground might well mean death from thirst or exhaustion. Two men, however, could have dealt with pretty well any emergency that was likely to befall a fifteen-hundredweight truck in first-class mechanical condition, with ample spares, water, petrol and wire netting in the back.

  It was mere bad luck that he was alone. Aslan, his tough Turkoman servant and driver, had gone down with dysentery. And that, if you like, was a marvel, considering that Aslan, for the better part of his life, had eaten nothing that had not been tasted by fourteen thousand flies before him, and had taken no harm. But there it was. Aslan had been left, weak and cursing, in the care of a friendly village headman, and Gwynn had gone on, telling himself that he would just reconnoitre the approaches and would not risk the journey.

  Laurence Gwynn was no passionate pilgrim for wealth or far horizons. He did not look a man likely to be alone in deserts, for he was slight and fair-complexioned and by no means in his first youth. His manner, even towards his truck, had something of indecisive courtesy. This, however, was only a conscious and easy adoption of the standards of the East, and it concealed a thoroughly Western honesty of purpose. He was a consultant geologist, and he knew Persia as well as any European, and a great deal better than any native Persian. He didn’t claim to love the country, but he readily admitted that it never bored him. He had reached a point of content, as in some successful mariage de convenance, whereat it was impossible to distinguish between love and continual interest.

  Curiosity – and at that a curiosity more personal than scientific – was the motive tempting him to take the jeweled road of salt crystals which led straight into the rising sun. Yet the story of the hill and its rocks that gleamed in darkness was nothing but a bazaar rumor. So, at least Gwynn told himself – repeatedly – as he tried to ensure the victory of caution over curiosity. Bazaar rumors flared up with the speed of epidemics. The scrap of knowledge was always present, like the typhus, but nobody bothered to recollect or to express it. Then, one noon under the arches, a whole street would discuss some fact that was perfectly familiar to their fathers, and embroider it with lies until, instead of truth with no publicity, they had publicity with no truth.

  The Russians had taken the rumor seriously, and dispatched, with what they hoped was secrecy, an old-fashioned expedition. They were right, of course, to use horse transport. You couldn’t report on possible routes and water supplies and geology from a plane. Gwynn considered this Russian excitement quite absurd. It confirmed, however, his own opinion that there was enough truth in the story to give an object – and no more – for a couple of weeks of pleasurable exploration.

  The gap between horizon and red sun grew to a hand’s breadth, and the stab of warmth, instant and relentless, was as keenly appreciable as had been, ten minutes earlier, the bitter cold of dawn. Gwynn’s common sense triumphed without more ado. It was folly to go on. There was no point in adding to the loneliness of that lonely desert.

  He let down his canvas bucket into the river, and was
hed and breakfasted. The taste of fruit, coffee and fried bacon reminded him that he was out for his pleasure, and that danger was not at all a necessary spice. He stowed his gear, and followed the river up its valley along a track worn by the hooves of herds and pack animals that had come down to the edge of the desert and moved along it until they could strike northwards again into the hills.

  Some ten miles up the ravine, the mountains drew away from the river, and rock and dust changed into soil. There were crops and a village. There were even trees – a line of slender poplars by the water, apricots in the terraced plots around the houses. It was a harsh, windswept, isolated site for human habitation, but its people, for Persian villagers, were by no means poor. They lived at a forbidding distance from government and the taxgatherer.

  Laurence Gwynn perceived at once, by the slight constraint that greeted his arrival, that there must be another stranger in the village. When he came to the open space of beaten earth by the village watering place, the elders were flurried as some hostess greeting a visitor of unexpected distinction at her own quiet party. They instantly surrounded his truck, revealing, though not isolating, the former center of attraction.

  On the communal bench, beneath the scanty line of poplars, sat a Negro. He was wearing a dented but carefully polished helmet which had once belonged to a trooper of the Horse Guards. His body, dressed in the remnants of European clothes, was slung about with oddments – a water bottle, an old messtin, a primus stove, a cluster of small and dirty jute bags, and a pair of shining cymbals. His gigantic, black, boat-like feet were bare, and the heels protruded so far aft that his shin seemed to be stepped into his foot at about the position of a mizzenmast.

  “Good morning, boss!” he remarked with a deep, assured voice.

  “Good-God-Good-Morning!” answered Gwynn in a single breath of surprise.

  The Negro rose, clashed his cymbals and broke into a shuffling dance that suggested the sinister spasms of a witch doctor. The villagers drew back in horrified curiosity. Gwynn watched with an interest that, at first, was by no means patronizing. It then occurred to him – and he admitted disappointment – that he could put on the act just as well himself. Those capers were pure fake – evidently a successful fake, for the Negro must have received a night’s lodging and, to judge by the empty bowls on the bench, a breakfast of bread and beans.

  “You do pretty well out of it,” said Gwynn.

  “If,” answered the Negro, pointing to the remains of the stomach-cheating beans, “you call this well.”

  He leapt, clattering, up and down as if to counteract or perhaps emphasize, for the sake of the villagers, the effect of his calm, sane utterance in the foreign tongue. The impression, Gwynn thought, might be that of an oracle speaking with solemn lucidity between the writhings of the spirit.

  “How long has the afflicted been with you?” he asked the headman.

  “He came last night. He could depart,” the headman added hopefully, “with your lordship. He will make the way short with fooleries and magic since he speaks your lordship’s tongue.”

  “He speaks Persian?”

  “A little. Like a child.”

  “What on earth are you doing here all alone?” Gwynn asked the Negro.

  “Seekin’ the light, oh ma lord!” he answered, merrily changing his cultured English to the dialect of the American colored man.

  “And when you’ve found it?” Gwynn invited, showing by a smile that he had caught – if he were meant to catch – the allusion to that bazaar rumor which had sent him too, though not on bare black feet, into this heart of aridity.

  “A small share, boss, a small share. I assure you I don’t expect to be allowed to keep very much of it for myself.”

  “You choose an odd way to travel.”

  “Oh, my dear sir – or boss, I mean – there are only two ways for an African to preserve his liberty. He can frighten you, or he can play the fool. And if he can do both at once, the world is open to him. It’s a lot more fun, you know, than being a crook politician on the Gold Coast.”

  “Like a lift?” Gwynn asked.

  It was partly interest in this sure, fantastic and obviously well-educated mountebank, and partly pity for the villagers who would never get rid of the incubus until it wanted to go.

  “Where to, boss?”

  The question was unanswerable. There was really nowhere to leave the man unless he were driven back to the Ispahan road; and, since that was the road from which he had fooled, begged and tramped his way into the hills, presumably he didn’t want to return there. Nor did Gwynn, yet.

  “Did you come along the river?” he asked.

  “Over the mountains.”

  “There’s a path?”

  “Just for two feet and four.”

  “Has it been used recently?”

  “Mr. Fomin is two valleys east of here with seven ponies and three men.”

  This answer, so detailed, so unreserved, was what he least expected. He knew that the Russians must be in or approaching the district, but that Fomin, a thoroughly competent geologist, should have fallen for this bazaar rumor of uranium was astonishing; he must have known very well how improbable it was that radioactivity could be the cause of this luminescence – if indeed there really was any. No doubt he had received an unarguable order from the ambassador or one of his satellite commissars. Nothing happened in Persia that they didn’t know, but, since their credulity was so immoderate, no truth was of any value.

  So there they all were – Fomin with ponies, himself with a truck, and this confounded Negro on the vast leathers of his feet, all chasing a story that had filtered down from a bunch of shepherds, a wandering tribe which, for one spring in twenty years, had found enough young grass to leave their usual route by the east of the hill and pass below its western face. And they had reported – what they pleased. A star imbedded in the hillside, a nameless glory, a whole hill that shone in the night.

  The older the civilization, he thought, the more mysterious the country. In the unexplored you knew exactly what you would find; the next, the unknown hundred miles had every chance of being exactly like the last, and if there were anything of humanity that was new, its precise degree of degradation would only excite an anthropologist. But in lands whose every mile had, sometime, been known to the priest or merchant, there was no guessing what you might discover.

  It wasn’t the first time he had followed a rumor. There was the story of the eternal flame and its altar – persistent among the nomad tribes of Luristan, though every educated Persian laughed at it. The legend had seemed worth investigation, for, to a mining engineer, there was nothing impossible about an eternal flame in oil-bearing hills. Sure enough he had found it, and sure enough it was eternal – or at any rate old enough to possess a rough altar four thousand years old. It was of no commercial value – there wasn’t a city within five hundred miles that would pay for the piping of natural gas – yet he had come again upon a mystery that was ancient before the first Zoroastrians had worshiped it.

  Something of this nature – known but forgotten, interesting but valueless – was what he expected to find, certainly nothing that was worth driving Fomin into a frenzy of suspicion. He didn’t want to meet the Russian. Fomin was too willing to change the history of the world on evidence which, if it were geological, wouldn’t have sufficed him for the drilling of a wildcat well; the mere presence of Gwynn would send him rushing back to Teheran with stories of imperial plots. Well, with luck, a meeting might be avoided. By batting straight across the desert he could reach the hill, be back at the river and away to Ispahan while Fomin and his ponies were still toiling down their valley to the edge of the salt.

  “Can you drive a truck?” he asked the Negro.

  “No, boss. But I could mighty near lift it.”

  That honest answer clinched the deal. There was, of course, risk in lying out in the desert with a helmeted and cymbaled eccentric. But Gwynn rejected it; he unhesitatingly placed his man in
that class of pilgrims who, before the war, could be found in Persia or on any of the walkable routes round the world, selling picture postcards of themselves as a means of subsistence.

  “Jump in!” he said.

  The Negro settled his helmet, and saluted the assembled villagers with an impressive upward thrust of the arm that suggested the lord of Africa dismissing his black and blood-stained legions. He followed this dignified improvement upon Mussolini by a fair attempt at all the Persian politenesses of leave-taking. The villagers evidently felt that he had been well worth the price of admission.

  It was midday when Gwynn and his companion reached his solitary camp of the previous night. There, under the shade of the truck’s canvas cover, they drank and forced themselves to eat a little – even the Negro’s appetite failed in such an oven – and drove out into the desert on a compass course.

  The route of the wandering shepherds was by no means a certainty; and the map, such as it was, depended on a mid–nineteenth century survey by the Government of India. That name at the head of the sheet seemed an imposing enough authority, but Gwynn knew well that the accuracy of the map depended on nothing but the lonely integrity of a young Englishman and his Punjabi assistant, both of whom, on a subsequent journey, had died of thirst.

  Still, there were only two hills the shepherds could have passed. One was at the end of a narrow peninsula of broken rocks that ran far out into the desert; the other, a more isolated hillock, was twenty miles beyond it – at any rate, according to the triangulation of those brown and white hands, sweating, unsteady, and long since mummified.

  The truck made fifty miles of easting with as little effort as if it had been running on tarmac. Only the high and trailing cloud of gray dust behind showed that the surface was friable. To the north, curving to meet the Hindu Kush, was the line of yellow mountains where Fomin was waiting in one of the folds for the heat of the day to pass, or perhaps debouching onto the plain with full water skins gently compressing the ribs of the ponies. To the south was nothing until a man came to the old caravan route to India; and that was so nearly nothing that he might cross without noticing it.