by Chad Brecher
Alex approached the glowing red dot and tried to place it within the context of the depiction of the world. It was located towards the bottom of the map and left of center.
Alex traced out the landmasses with his finger while intermittently glancing back at his audience. He could see several of the armed mercenaries allow their guns to lower slightly as they looked on in wonder.
He started at the far left of the map. “This is Java.” He pointed to an island at the edge of the map. “Remember, in this map, left is east and right is west, up is south and down is north. If you move to the right or west, you hit China.” His finger ran just above the surface of the map and paused at a large area of land. “If you go further west you hit the Ganges River.” His finger followed the serpentine river as it cut into South Asia. “Beyond it to the west is India. Now if you go down or north, you are into the western portions of China.” Alex’s finger stopped at the red dot. “This location is between Asia and what the map refers to as Scythia.”
“Scythia?” Clay asked.
Ellie stepped up and spoke.
“It’s an area named after a nomadic people in the eighth century B.C. called the Scythians. Herodotus wrote about them. When people talk about Scythia they usually are thinking of what some would call Eurasia.”
“Or Central Asia,” Alex added. “The wind roses are directing us to a place deep in the heart of Mongolia.”
“Intriguing,” muttered Phillip.
Alex drew closer to the map and examined the red spot projecting on the canvas. It was on a portion of the map that was devoid of any symbol or writing. He brought his face so close to the surface of the map that his nose nearly brushed up against it. He could see the surface of the map that was illuminated red was irregular, bubbled, with a faint, nearly imperceptible web of cracks, like a break in a car’s windshield. As he studied the latticework of cracks, he could see that a small, irregular piece of paint had fallen away, revealing the original white canvas upon which the map was painted.
“What’s this?” he whispered.
He nearly gasped at the sight of a portion of black writing seemingly tattooed upon the white canvas.
“There’s something underneath this map!” Alex exclaimed. Ellie and Phillip surged forward towards the spot. Phillip pushed Ellie and Alex aside and examined the surface of the map.
“Yes,” the old man hissed and looked back at Alex with maniacal eyes. Phillip ran his finger across the rough surface of the map and wedged the tip of a fingernail under the flaking paint. He scratched at the surface, sending tiny flecks of brown floating to the floor.
“What are you doing?” Alex protested and advanced towards the man.
Suddenly Phillip swung around, removed a short blade from his pocket, and held it up in the air.
“Whoa!” Alex jumped back with his hands defensively raised.
“Don’t worry, Mr. Stone. It’s not meant for you.” Phillip smirked, bent down, and slid the tip of the blade behind a raised portion of the paint. He proceeded to flick off the paint layer.
“You’re going to destroy the map, for God’s-sake! Stop. It’s a priceless piece of history! We could have the map radiographed to see what is underneath that coat of paint. It’s been done many times before to see if an artist painted over any earlier work. It won’t harm the map. The technology is out there.”
Phillip turned back to Alex with a look of impatience. “And how do you suppose we do that? Should we inform the board of the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana that we intend on wheeling in a ton of high-tech imaging equipment so we could spend months analyzing the x-rays? I appreciate your concern, but this is far quicker.”
Alex took a small step backward and bowed his head slightly. He felt a profound sense of guilt as he watched the old man pick at the map. But he could not help but acknowledge that despite his desire to preserve this historical piece, his heart yearned to see what was beneath the paint.
Phillip paused, looked back at Alex, and squinted. He placed the knife on the floor and then turned and glanced at Clay, Ellie, and Jonas. “When I reveal what is behind here, I will be asking you to join me for the final journey. My motive will be simple: I still believe you can help me. You will all say yes, not that you will have a choice. You will try to convince yourself that your decision to join me was about self-preservation but in your hearts, you will know that this is not true. You will come because you cannot bear to not see this through to the end, whatever the costs.”
The old man smiled, revealing perfectly white teeth, lifted the blade from the ground, and wiped it on his sleeve. He returned to picking and peeling away paint until he was left with a square-foot of exposed white canvas. In the center, written in black and stained into the underlying fabric, were a series of symbols. The symbols were written vertically and consisted of several columns.
Jonas slipped the wind rose into his pocket. “Looks like chicken-scratch to me.”
Ellie bent over and examined the symbols. “It’s strange. It almost looks like Sanskrit, but it’s not. It has elements of Arabic with the cursive appearance but it’s not. It’s vertically oriented like Chinese but it is most certainly not Chinese.” She bit her lip.
“It’s Uyghur,” Phillip stated matter-of-factly. “Or at least an Uyghur-derived script. It might be more accurate to say that it is Mongolian. The Mongols conquered the Naimans — a Turkish people living on the steppes. A man by the name of Tata-Tonga who was captured helped adapt the written language of his people to the Mongol culture, which did not have a written language. You are right that it is written vertically and left to right for that matter.”
“What does it say?” Alex asked.
The old man smiled broadly. “It says: Sacred Kaldun, Where Eden Lies.”
“What does it mean?” asked Jonas.
Phillip held his blade up to the exposed canvas and with a stab drove the tip of the knife into it. With a sawing motion he cut away a swatch of canvas containing the message. A gaping black hole was left in the map. Alex looked down at the hole with dismay.
Phillip silently folded the piece of canvas and finally looked up.
“It means we are going on a trip. All of us.”
Mongolia
69
The Toyota truck suddenly lurched forward with a squeal like a wounded animal. Ellie backed away and watched the tires, glistening with a layer of shiny mud, fruitlessly spin. Globs of detritus from the forest floor were spat into the air as the rear chassis of the vehicle wiggled back and forth. One of the mercenaries, a bespectacled young man who looked like he belonged in an office cubical rather than trudging through the wilderness with soldiers of fortune, whom Ellie learned was named Martin, leaned his head out of the driver’s side window, shrugged, and turned off the ignition.
“It’s for shit, Sir,” he barked out the window.
He emerged from the cabin, smoking a cigarette, and promptly plopped his boots into the thick, black mud.
“Fantastic,” she could hear him complain as he waded through the slime.
Ellie swatted at a horse fly that had settled upon the nape of her neck and peered back at Alex who was perched atop the gnarled, exposed root of a tree. He pulled out a water bottle, took a drink, and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. The stubble on his face and unkempt hair told volumes of the ordeal to date. Ellie could feel warm sweat trickle down her shirt and settle in the small of her back. The fabric of her shirt clung tightly to her as she bent down to retrieve her bottle of water. She wordlessly climbed up the short embankment and sat down next to Alex.
They sat side by side in silence and watched as the two other jeeps maneuvered in front of the truck trapped in the mud. They could see Phillip emerge from the lead jeep. He was dressed in an olive-colored tee shirt and khaki pants and wore a handkerchief loosely around his neck. He stood by the front of the jeep and stretched out a map across the hood, securing each end with a water bottle. He motioned for Solomon and the Mongolian guide to join him.
As they conferred by the front of the jeep, members of Solomon’s team began to remove cables to hook up to the immobilized truck. They moved matter-of-factly, having performed the same task five times previously. The remote wilderness of Mongolia had proven to be a formidable opponent, confronting them with a dearth of paved roads and a plethora of impassable paths. One fateful turn of the wheel onto an unseen patch of mud hidden beneath a blanket of leaves could spell disaster.
Your mission is cursed. That was what the old Mongolian shaman had said shortly after their arrival at Möngönmorit, a small town at the northeast corner of the aimag or province of Töv. The man was rumored by locals to be the most capable guide into the Khan Khentii Strictly Protected Area that straddled central and eastern Mongolia. They had found him cooking over an open fire beside a rundown, wooden cabin on the steppes. Dressed in a flannel shirt, loose-fitting pants, and a floppy white hat, the man had squatted by an iron pot, mixing a turbid stew with a long spoon. He glanced up from his task and looked at his visitors suspiciously through his right eye, the left eye having long ago become clouded white by a cataract. The young Mongolian man who had brought the group out to the cabin to see the shaman looked embarrassed as he translated Phillip’s request for a guide to travel to Burkhan Khaldum — the Sacred Hill — deep in the heart of the Khentii mountain range.
The old man had continued to stir the stew and listened without interruption. When he finally spoke, his voice was raspy and raw, a suitable match for the windblown skin of his face. The young Mongolian hesitated and then translated with a look of apprehension.
“I know why you are here. I know more than you would think. This had all been foretold. First the Soviets came here with their tanks and sealed off this area. They with their Mongolian cronies destroyed the monasteries and slaughtered the monks. They tried to destroy our spirit, but failed. What were they afraid of, I ask you? Then one day, poof…they left. They could not kill a spirit of a people that has soaked into the grasslands, mixed with the rivers, and has become one with the trees, the stars, the sky. Now you come after all this time from the West with money and seek to pay for these secrets. You, too, will fail. Money means nothing here.” He looked up at Phillip and pointed his thin finger menacingly his way. “Beware what you seek under the Eternal Sky for it does not belong to you. Your mission is cursed.” The old man had spat on the dirt ground and went back to stirring the pot as if he was alone once again.
Phillips eyes blazed with rage. He bent down, gripped the man’s shirt sleeve, and tugged several times. “Are you Darkhad? Darkhad?”
The shaman pulled his shirt from Phillip’s grip, smiled at him, and resumed cooking.
Phillip stood up with a look of disgust and walked over to Solomon. Phillip leaned in and whispered something in Solomon’s ear. Solomon nodded and walked over to the old man. He suddenly reached down and grabbed the diminutive man by his collar and violently dragged him to his feet. Without a word, Solomon slipped a gun from his waistband, pressed the barrel against the man’s forehead, and fired. A spray of blood, shards of skull, and brain matter diffused across the blue sky. Solomon let the limp form crumple to the ground in a heap. He spat onto the man.
“Let this be a warning to the Darkhad,” Solomon bellowed. As if in response, the wind across the grassland began to pick up. He angrily directed the gun towards the young Mongolian man who stood twisting the brim of his hat nervously in his hands. The man winced at the sight of the weapon, expecting to be struck down as well.
“Ogdon?”
“Ogdi…but …you can call me…Jimmie,” the man said nervously.
“Well, Jimmie. This is your lucky day. You just got yourself a job. How would you like to take us to this holy mountain?”
A screech interrupted Alex’s thought process. Instead of the jeep pulling the truck out of the mud, the motor of the jeep sputtered wildly. Smoke began to waft from the hood of the jeep as the vehicle began to slip and slide backwards until its bumper contacted the truck and its rear wheels sunk deep into the mud.
They could see Phillip slam the ball of his hand upon the jeep’s hood in frustration. Solomon looked on stoically as one of his men popped open the hood. The jeep belched out a long cloud of gray smoke that wafted into the cloudless sky. Alex could see the smoke clear the tops of the tree and wondered how far the smoke could be seen. Will it bring help? he wondered to himself.
“We could try to hitch the last jeep up, but it’s risky,” Solomon said to Phillip as he took a step back to avoid getting a face full of smoke. “If that vehicle goes down, then it’s a long hike back to Möngönmorit. ‘You can call me Jimmie’ was right, we should have brought horses. This terrain is no good for vehicles. We could send someone back for help.”
“And wait for him? We will camp here and set out on foot tomorrow. Nothing is going to stop us from reaching Burkham Khaldun.”
This mission is cursed, Alex repeated in his head with a mix of foreboding and promise.
70
The damp wood hissed violently when it was dumped onto the fire pit. Steam escaped and floated into the night air. Ellie pulled the windbreaker tightly against her body and huddled closer to Alex. The temperature had dropped precipitously after the sun set, and the vivid purple of dusk was replaced by the blackness of night. If she was not so chilled to the bone, she might have thought of the massive night sky that loomed above as a thing of beauty. Far away from the lights of any city, the sky teemed with an infinite number of brilliant stars. It was overwhelming and humbling.
No wonder the Mongols worshipped the Eternal Sky as a god, Ellie thought as she hooked her arm around Alex’s elbow, shivered, and drew him even closer.
Clay approached them with a can of beans, which he delicately cupped in his hands to keep warm. A single spoon awkwardly stuck out of the top of the can.
“It’s lukewarm at best, I’m afraid,” he announced and handed the can to Ellie who quickly spooned a portion of the brown beans into her mouth. They were strangely mushy and flavorless.
Jonas arrived with a second can of beans. He let himself flop down upon the ground and wrapped a blanket around his body. He blew on his hands several times and ran his palms back and forth against each other, hoping that the friction would warm his numbed fingertips.
“Are we close to Eden? It sure doesn’t feel like paradise here.” Jonas could see his breath before him as he spoke. “I thought we would be in a warmer place — somewhere like the Middle East.”
“It’s a reasonable point,” Alex answered, took a bite of the beans, and passed the can back to Ellie. “Ellie, you know more about this subject than anyone.”
Ellie raised another spoonful of beans to her mouth and plopped them on her tongue. She chewed the soft legumes for a moment, swallowed, and reached for her water. Ellie could not believe that here she was in the Mongolian wilderness, about to lecture on Eden. But somehow, the switch to her professor-mode was reassuring and familiar.
“It’s complicated. The idea of ‘Eden’ is something that predated the Bible — the vision of a magical land free of death and disease. Almost every culture has some otherworld to aspire towards. We are biased of course by the hegemony of a Judeo-Christian faith. Whether you believe that Moses penned the Bible or not, there is little debate that it was written from the perspective of a middle-easterner. What would ‘paradise’ be to a person who lived in the desert anyway? It would be a land that was lush, green — a place where water was plentiful and food readily available. What emerges is an image of the prototypical garden.
“The word ‘paradise’ originally comes from the Persian word ‘apiri-daeza’ that roughly translates to an orchard bounded by a wall. Now the origin of the word ‘Eden’ is even more interesting. In Hebrew it translates to ‘delight.’ It probably comes from a Sumerian word ‘E. din’ that means an open expanse of nature — a great plains or, in other words, steppes.
“Imagine, however, you lived in the jungles of Brazil where you are surrounded
by tropical vegetation and plentitude of rainfall. Your idea of paradise or Eden may be very different than someone living in the desert.”
“The Bible, however, is fairly specific about Eden,” Clay challenged. “It talks about certain rivers running through it.”
Ellie paused before speaking, waiting for one of Solomon’s men to return from the perimeter of their encampment. The man slung his rifle across his back and warmed his hands against the fire.
“What the Bible says was that God planted a garden in the eastern portion of Eden. It says that there was a river that flowed out of Eden — a single source — that divided into four separate rivers. These rivers were the Pishon, Gihon, Tigris, and Euphrates Rivers. Now a lot of scholarship has been devoted to these rivers through the centuries. In particular, there has been great debate over what rivers were called Pishon and Gihon. Titus Flavius Josephus, the first century Jewish historian, postulated that the Pishon corresponded to the Ganges River and the Gihon to the Nile. This was the dominant view for centuries amongst scholars and religious figures. As for the Tigris and Euphrates…they exist to this day, running through Iraq. Researchers who have been consumed with identifying possible locations for Eden have not surprisingly centered their attention on the Middle East. Utilizing satellite imagery to identify dried riverbeds, a recent view places Eden somewhere in current-day Iran. Others have argued that Eden is now underwater, somewhere off the coast of Saudi Arabia.
“Names can be a serious problem in the Bible. As a historical piece of work, the Bible doesn’t pass much muster. It is full of inconsistencies. It is not surprising that certain names, locations, and times may be off. But mostly I, and others, have wondered whether cultures within the Middle East co-opted prior legends and dressed them up in their own familiar garb.”
“What do you mean?” Clay asked.
“Let’s take the myth of paradise with four rivers flowing from it. Now think how limited travel must have been in Biblical times. If you went a couple of miles, this probably seemed like a universe away. What they knew about the world was local. There was no ‘world history’ in those days. All ‘world history’ was inevitably ‘local history.’ If there was a tale of four rivers, then it seems reasonable that people may assign these rivers familiar names. Thus, there is no reason to think that the Euphrates River in the Bible is the same Euphrates River we know today. Which came first? It’s a chicken-versus-egg game. Maybe people settled near a river whose cycles of flooding created a rich environment for planting. It was paradise to those who lived near it and consequently this extraordinary river must be the Euphrates River of the Bible. The name sticks and the rest is history. And then there’s the whole Flood thing.”