The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir

by Susan Daitch

  The urbane European crowds of Alexandria who, in the evening, multiplied like hydra, were always a respite from the more formal, careful life of Cairo. I was left alone most of the time while Aidan continued to receive telegrams and all kinds of messages from his office that I was not privy to. I walked along the beach near the merloned walls of the Qaitbay Citadel, observed sand erosion, and tossed Archer’s Isis into the sea. Some day, when the sea has dried up, some archaeologist will find it and may not realize he’s only laid his hands on a cheap Edwardian imitation. I played at the casinos, won a bit, lost more, drank too much.

  We returned to Cairo, and Aidan seemed energized, eager to get back to work Monday morning. About an hour after he left, I went round to Ryder’s apartment. The concierge, a Greek woman who spoke some English, told me no one by that name lived there anymore. If I hadn’t just been at her courtyard a few weeks earlier I would have thought one of us was hallucinating. I insisted. She shrugged and told me to go look for myself which, not wanting to appear mad or desperate, I declined to do. At Archer’s residence I was told exactly the same thing, but more. There had been a murder in Archer’s rooms. A boy had been found dead. Mr. Hilliard had disappeared. They’d left with no warning or goodbyes. A murderer in this building, the concierge raised his eyebrows. Mr. Hilliard had always seemed like a gentleman. He paused, and I realized if I handed him a bundle of piastres, I would hear more, but I’d none to give.

  I rushed back to tell Aidan that his spy had gone, but he already knew about Hilliard’s departure.

  A dead Egyptian boy, I’ve been informed. And not just any anonymous boy, the son of a minister. It happened while we were away. Of course, Hilliard claimed he had no knowledge of the boy or how he got into his rooms. He just woke up and the corpse was there.

  Don’t you believe him?

  No, not really.

  What if he’s telling the truth?

  It doesn’t particularly matter, because no one else believes he’s telling the truth. Khedive Abbas wants a quick trial followed by a swift execution, and we don’t give him much, but we have to give him that. Hilliard had no choice but to flee the country, and with so much unfinished business on his part, it was very inconvenient timing. More’s the pity he’ll never be able to return, but he’s left an awful mess for me to clean up. Look here, Esme. He held out a newspaper. The largest luxury ship ever built has just left Southampton for New York. It was supposed to be unsinkable. Hardly any lifeboats at all.

  Do you know where they went?

  I told you, the ship is bound for New York.

  No, Hilliard and Congreaves.

  How should I know? Suolucidir, I believe, was the name of a city Hilliard mentioned.

  I left that night, taking my cameras and a large box that contained my attempts at constructing a portable darkroom.

  In order to get permission to travel east, I had first to go to Smyrna, where I met with Consul General Henry Lamb. He had advised Gertrude Bell before she trekked toward Baghdad, and he was not keen on letting ladies travel further east. There were railway lines from Kirman to Bandar Abbas, then what? The camel, I told him, has been invented. He laughed at me as if I’d arrived at his map room intending to navigate the desert with astrolabe and orrery. “Was the game worth the candle?” he asked, incredulous. I can tell when people think I’m an idiot, whether it’s Archie Hilliard or that Jew in Marseilles. The problem is, even knowing this, I don’t know how to get the better of them, really I don’t.

  Lamb had embassy parties, similar to those we’d had in Cairo, though conversations were turning more to the possibility of war at our doorstep. Some said it would never happen, there would be no all-engulfing war to end all wars, others said, just you wait and see, and get your family to some remote safe place. Lamb introduced me to W. Morgan Shuster, an American economist who had been posted to Tehran, on his way back to Washington. Shuster had a very clear, direct gaze, and he spoke with despair about Persia, as if it were a delinquent child whose behavior was due more to his living conditions than acts of his own will. I had trouble following the tangled history, and though I frowned in concentration, I remained rooted to the spot, listening. Like the General Consul, he advised me to go no further.

  Expect a cast of European characters shoving the Persian government toward bankruptcy while enriching themselves. Russia panders to the vices of the Shah, like one who gives rum to a drunkard. Watch out for a Monsieur Monsard, Belgian Customs official, a Russian tool. The War Department is a brilliant galaxy of uniformed loafers and scoundrels.

  I plan to photograph Suolucidir.

  Never heard of the place.

  Vita Sackville-West, while visiting Iran in 1936 for the coronation of the new shah, wrote that her hosts saw to it she was up to her elbows in pearls and emeralds trying to find what to wear, Emily piped up. I didn’t know who she was talking about. We were getting cold in the attic and would have to return downstairs soon.

  Tell us about how you got to Iran from Smyrna.

  I never went to Iran. I ran out of money, sold my camera, then a package and letter arrived from Ryder. They had found the lost city, and had made plans to return to England. Just as no one could have predicted I would fall in love with Ryder, the lost city, when it was found, was as much a surprise to Hilliard as it was for Congreaves. Hilliard looked on the artifacts of Suolucidir like a peach pie bought at the side of the road, a nice thing found by accident. What happened to his titanium mines and Baluchi slaves, his reports about German treachery and Russian double cross? Dropped in the face of Suolucidiri riches? No one knows. Archer wanted to dance on my grave, but look who’s left, eh?

  I wrote to Ryder that my heart was in his hands. I would meet him in England. A few weeks later their ship was sunk in the Gulf of Oman. From Turkey I returned to Europe, slowly making my way, dodging the bombardments of the Dardanelles, embattled Sarajevo, and so on. Snow was clinging to the fenestrations. The attic was no longer habitable, and we would have to leave. Were the things Ryder sent me really from a place called Suolucidir? Impossible to identify, though some thought so. Impossible to know for certain. We mine and extract and define ourselves accordingly: eyes as green as emeralds, black as coal, red as rubies, etc., but eventually the supply runs out, or the waters wash over us, the sun explodes, and we eventually become rocks ourselves.

  We made our way downstairs. They wanted to look at my photographs: Shuster posing with his wife, the Jerusalem gate, a Cairene cook dressed in white holding a skinned lamb, an arched corridor in the Qaitbey citadel, gamblers posing with hands held behind their backs, top-hatted German magician with the tools of his trade, what a smile he had, a little girl named Rigg whose father worked under my husband, stockings down around her ankles holding a tennis racket that’s too big for her. Assistant attaché, a young man named Blanckenship holding up headlines about the Titanic. No pictures of Ryder or Archie? Emily asked, growing familiar. I shook my head.

  The following day when the sun was bright and high we got permission to go on another walk in town. A midnight snowfall had settled over Kierling. The name glides off as your tongue, dances from K to G. Outside the sanatorium, scalloped wrought iron fences turned into a series of toothy smiles. I brushed snow from pine cone–shaped finials while Emily Topper struggled valiantly to propel Casper Wakefield in his wheelchair down the walkways. We listened to children practicing the violin, cello, clarinet maybe, as we strolled.

  Around one corner we glimpsed a man pulling down a red and black poster, shreds stuck to his hands, and he ran when he saw the three of us plodding along, though surely he must have guessed we were only foreign guests from the sanatorium. Kierling is sleepy, peaceful, and incredibly quiet. Very little news of the outside world has penetrated the town. Beyond the city limits there is only snow, trees, mountains, and it’s easy to imagine the forest populated by reclusive souls who have never heard of Kurt von Schuschnigg or Kurt Schwitters. I take pleasure in the idea that Kierling is the whole world
.

  Despite the storm the night before, the snow was beginning to melt, it was so warm, and we felt as if we were witnessing the first hints of spring. Wakefield, sitting in a wheelchair, with a rug over his lap, pale yellow hair plastered to the sides of his head not covered by his homburg, was in high spirits. Since Emily had had a good night’s sleep, she was up to challenging everything she’d heard the previous evening. It’s all a story and therefore not real, she said as if she’d suddenly discovered something, part of a long complicated, branching narrative that reduces each constituent part as time moves on. I parried: as layers accrete, the bottom gets compressed, turns into coal, oil, diamonds. At the end it doesn’t matter which version is true, though they all fit together. I took over pushing Casper, who craned his neck, inhaling as deeply as he was able. The town was its usual sleepy self, but as we rounded a corner from Klosterneuberger onto Medekstrasse we saw a very frightening sight. Four or five larger children were beating up a small one, well perhaps not so much smaller, but certainly outnumbered. There was blood on the snow. We shouted for them to stop in our limited, badly accented German, but really we were powerless. Emily put her hands over her eyes while Casper torqued his body around in the chair in order to see more clearly. I told the others, whatever’s going on, it’s not our affair, after all, let’s press on. And so we did.

  THE LIBRARIAN TAPPED ME ON the shoulder. The Institute was closing, she took the box of sanatorium records from me. Did I want to make an appointment to come back another day? No. I was done. This small sliver of Esme Canonbury was all I needed to look at, and with that she was returned to deep storage, perhaps never to be seen again. Who would find her and haul her out into twenty-first century air?

  Outside it had begun to storm, and hailstones the size of robin’s eggs fell from the sky. They tore through papers, skidded off umbrellas and awnings, collecting in growing mounds as if the city were preparing to be packed and shipped to another planet. With no hat, helmet, or even papers to hold over my head, I ran to the subway. Underground felt crowded and safe. If Esme could be summoned and ferried from one underground, presumably Austrian location, to another, here to New York as the F train hurtled under the East River towards Coney Island, only to burst into the sun as it emerged from the tunnel, what would she have chosen to photograph?

  The river of kids just out of high school at 3:30, flooding the subway, shouting over their walkmen, rehashing the days’ fights and rifts and pranks, suddenly quiet, grabbing seats when a policeman is sighted? Their music silenced, or at least turned way down. Would she also photograph the policeman, a young guy with tattooed arms? Take the shots quickly before the train plunges back underground, because with the kind of old camera she has, you have to use available light. Esme stumbles. She’s just one more artifact.

  Just when you think the city is sealed, and it’s vanished along with much evidence of its existence: pornographic plates, spineless Weimar-era notebooks, passports assembled in basements, votives made from gaskets and wing nuts, all of it rises to life like the broom splinters in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, fully formed, ready to carry water until the palace, if not the whole city itself, is flooded.

  The Zwieg Institute of the Future will marshal all our bits and pieces in oxygen-free containers. But if there is no degrading air in the room, neither can humans spend much time within unless they have special equipment. The bits and pieces travel from the unlivable to the livable and back again.

  What drives people to explore inhospitable parts of the planet where oxygen thins, water pressure is deadly, light can’t penetrate, extremes of heat and cold are unbearable? So you make it to these remote extremes, and return to the surface, to sea level, holding your trophy, your evidence of early life, of rare minerals, but still a part of your audience will ask, so what? Why bother? What’s it good for?

  JEWELED RICE MADE WITH ORANGE peel, saffron, and dried cherries, fessenjan perfumed with pomegranate, walnuts, and cardamom — impossible to taste again. In place of desert air I inhaled truck exhaust from the construction pit outside my window. I looked at the cranes and backhoes parked in the pit, site of a future tower, as if I’d just landed from Mars and had no obvious way of returning home. No Americans were going back the way I’d come. The construction pit, at first, was a parody of the work I’d done in Suolucidir. As backhoes and shovels went deeper, below the initial layers of bottle caps and empty stolen wallets stripped of cash and credit cards, there lay olive oil tins, trunks with false bottoms used on the underground railroad, and cornhusk figures made by the Lenape people who greeted Henry Hudson. All ended up tossed into a garbage barge on the Gowanus Canal. I found maps of Suolucidir in the layers of peeling paint on girders on subway platforms. Seven layers, each a different color, made topographical patterns, ridges: here were the teeth of a coastline and further up somewhere in the ridges of paint lay the caves, here a wadi, there was where cold air blasted out of the buried city. I sat opposite a man reading a book on the double R train, his place marked by a crumpled blue aerogramme, humming Da Ya Think I’m Sexy? That song was everywhere. Behind his head subway mosaics flashed by at stop after stop: Chinese lettering at Canal Street, a beaver at Astor Place, while halfway around the world other underground mosaics were probably being looted, carried off bit by bit in the middle of the night. Winged lions, scorpions, a bull balancing the earth on his horns his hoofs treading on fish scales, all of it ending up embedded in a lucite table in a Tokyo, Paris, or Milanese living room. I set a row of limes on a radiator and let them dry until they turned brown and hollow. When they seemed ready, I smashed them with a hammer, swept the pieces into a pot of boiling water, strained the sour, bitter liquid, then added sugar in an attempt to replicate the tea I used to drink in cafés in Zahedan. Around this time I learned that the archive in Tehran that had housed the Suolucidir scroll had burned in a riot, though I have no way of knowing if the scroll had been returned, or if it had been stored or hidden elsewhere. You hear of cases like that, antiquities disappear in times of chaos only to reappear safe and sound, protected in another city. I could only hope that the scroll, if it existed at all, had met the latter fate.

  There’s a group in Italy who are building some of Da Vinci’s inventions, based on what they found in his notebooks. They began with his hang gliders. Leonardo watched birds for hours, studied how they fly, and based his drawings on what he observed. The group built a replica of Da Vinci’s hang glider using systems of pulleys and levers, but the bird model turned out to be unstable. They added a tail, and then it did fly, though it wasn’t exactly true to his original design. I’ve written to express my interest in joining them, and in my letter I made a reference to Da Vinci’s Citta l’Ideale, a multi-layered city he designed with houses situated above roads and navigable canals that would connect the metropolis to the sea. Reconstructing cities is something I have some experience in.

  One or two things I know about Suolucidir: the lost city is the object that always recedes just out of reach, and at the same time mirrors its excavators whether they recognize their reflections in its pools and canals or, momentarily blinded, catch sight of only unfamiliar phantoms beckoning with riches, escape hatches, trunks full of anything you think you desire.