by Harold Lamb
"You do like riddles." Jacob sighed. "Yes, I suppose it could happen. It doesn't follow at all that your mythical Asiatic-cave-men-ancestors-with-bronze would make a winged horse as beautiful as a beastie by Phidias just for art's sake. The thing's not useful. You can't expect me to believe that."
From a drawer at his side the young curator drew two pieces of bronze and an object carefully wrapped in silk. One of the bronze specimens looked like a horse's bit with ornamental cheek pieces. The other might have been a small hammer or battle-ax. Carefully cleaned, although cruder than the horse, they showed the same workmanship.
"And so?" Jacob prodded.
The two museum bronzes, Daoud explained, came from a mound excavated during the war at Tell Ramsar not far from Baghdad. The interesting thing about them was that they had been found under the crude brickwork of a prehistoric temple, at the lowest level of the excavation wherein the other objects were all of polished stone. So these bronzes seemed to have intruded into an earlier time.
"Really, I am not asking you to believe anything, Jacob. There are the three bronzes of Araman——" He broke off abruptly.
"Of what?"
"Of Araman. That is merely our name for them. We do not know how to describe them otherwise."
"You found bronzes in a stone age level in archaeological time?"
"I saw them dug out." Daoud smiled tentatively. "If we were Americans we would publish a story about how we had found a new cradle of civilization or something like that at Tell Ramsar."
"If you were American, you would tell the truth about the bronzes."
"I am telling the truth."
"All right. Then tell me that the Empire State Building can be dug up under Khufru's pyramid. Buried there. I'll believe you just as much."
The Arab laughed. This was a joke he could appreciate. He savored it, thinking how to increase it fittingly. "No, it's too big," he responded. "I've seen pictures of it."
Jacob wasn't satisfied. His friend's excitement at seeing the winged horse that was so much finer than the other pieces had been unmistakable. But now he had become obscure about the bronzes he called "of Araman."
"If you found them at a prehistoric level, some workman must have planted them."
"Planted?"
"Sneaked them down into your excavation under everything else."
Daoud shook his head decisively. "No, Jacob. One cannot plant objects without digging up the earth first. This ground had not been disturbed." He reflected, then added cautiously, "You see, the evidence of the mound shows that these bronzes were not made at Ramsar. The people of the Ramsar temple, or earlier, must have used stone implements. We assume that the bronzes were brought to the village of Ramsar by some merchant or traveler from the mountains. No other explanation seems to fit. Perhaps the inhabitants of Ramsar valued the strange bronzes highly because they were buried under the temple. But that is conjecture, Jacob."
"Then conjecture some more. I'm interested. You're making my horse a very valuable find, Daoud. A landmark in time, no less. You're doing beautifully. So some hither to-unknown workmen in a place you call Araman turned out a full-fledged, Greek-fine Pegasus."
"Not a Pegasus, Jacob. Your Greeks didn't invent Pegasus until four millenniums later."
"There you go with millenniums. My proto-Pegasus, then. You're holding out on me, Daoud. Come across. What and where was Araman?"
Daoud looked troubled. "If I told you anything more the director would put me in prison. Can I show the winged horse to the director tonight?"
"Certainly. I have no secrets. You can keep my horse tonight—on one consideration."
"What consideration?" Daoud scented a jest.
"Just give me one hint as to what and where Araman is."
Beaming, Daoud pondered. "I will give you three excellent hints. Listen carefully, Captain Ide. The place of Araman—it is on the track of the oldest lions. It's where East and West first met, and the Tower of Babel was built because of it. There. They are fine hints, because we don't know much more ourselves. Exercise your ingenuity on them until tomorrow morning."
When Jacob left, the Arab bent over the bronze horse as if in prayer.
Jacob did not return to the museum the next morning. The interest of the archaeologist in his purchase excited him, because he knew Daoud would not make a joke out of such a find. Besides, he wanted to solve Daoud's riddles, or to seem to solve them. To do so would be to impress Daoud, and he himself might learn a lot in the process. It would be like breaking a cipher—simple enough if you kept on the right track but otherwise impossible.
He selected the library of the museum for his workshop, and before looking at any books he considered the mind of his friend. Daoud, he suspected, wanted him to solve the riddles.
In Daoud's thoughts lay the puzzle. In his honest, scientifically trained mind the archaeologist accepted the fact that some unknown people of a place called Araman had worked metals as skillfully as artists could do it today. That had been done, Daoud thought, seven or eight thousand years ago. That was before copper had been melted with tin to make bronze elsewhere, or horses had been tamed. It did not seem possible, of course, but Daoud accepted it because of some evidence that had come to his attention. This had been done in Araman, which might be a city, or a river valley, or a mountain chain. Probably it would not be found on any map.
The name suggested Aramaic, the language of Jesus of Nazareth. Or Ararat, the mountain of survival, after the great floods, in Biblical tradition. Daoud—Jacob's memory held tenaciously to such details—had connected the name Araman with mountains. Daoud himself, Jacob suspected, was descended from the Kurds of the mountains north of Baghdad.
Making a mental note that he might be searching for an unnamed mountain chain, Jacob switched his attention to the archaeological part of Daoud's mind. The archaeologists had been digging up fantastic secrets of primitive men in these last two generations, after they had deciphered cuneiform, the wedge writing of Ur and the cities of the Two Rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. They had made certain, inevitably, that long before the pyramids were built an advanced civilization existed in Ur, and Kish and Lagash, cities on these rivers.
From the library where he sat Jacob could have thrown a stone into the gray water of the swift Tigris.
He did not need to turn to books to trace back in his mind the path of archaeological discovery—the road, as it were, of human progress. It ran from the east. Greece had borrowed secrets from the island of Crete; that island had drawn knowledge of arts from the Nile Valley; the Nile civilization had been in turn indebted to that of the Two Rivers, which had been fostered by an older culture farther east, perhaps in Susa within the border mountains of Persia—perhaps farther to the northeast, within the mountain fringe of the main continent, Eurasia itself. Yes, the path of human progress might lead from that unknown northeast, the heart of the continent.
The earliest cultures had moved onward along river watersheds, where animals could graze, where the fertile soil of the banks could be cultivated by primitive stone tools.
The archaeologists were certain that this path of human progress had crossed the Tigris about here, yet had started somewhere—either near at hand or remotely far—within the hinterland, where grass grew and water ran and minerals lay, perhaps in a mountainous region.
Jacob pictured such a region carefully in his mind. Of course the presence of the minerals first known to men—copper, gold, silver, tin—meant nothing in itself. Savages could live for generations beside an outcropping of copper ore and do no more than stare at the red coloring. It took intelligence and skill to extract the metal and use it—to fashion pottery molds. It had taken superb artistry to make his bronze horse.
And horses might exist beside a village of bow-and-arrow hunters and be used, if caught at all, for no more than milk and food. His Aramanians—the word persisted in sounding like Armenians—must have had courage and imagination to tame and ride the wild horses. But if so, if they had w
orked strong bronze superbly and had tamed horses centuries before the peoples around them, they would have had great advantages over men who labored with polished stone. Bronze swords, for instance, could give them supremacy over wielders of stone battle-axes; the horses could carry them faster than any men could run. They must, in some way, have kept the secret of their bronzes and their tame charges.
He now had an inkling of Daoud's first riddle, the track of the oldest lions. Daoud certainly had not meant living animals. The Arab had been thinking of the lions in the museum, hewn out of steatite, or alabaster, the work of long-dead artists—the oldest lions.
Jacob turned to the books, and was soon satisfied that the track of the oldest man-made lions ran from the Two Rivers west into Egypt and Asia Minor. The earliest beasts incised upon schist, in prehistoric Egypt, were strangely like those carved along the Tigris in that remote time. They were not so much like the elongated beasts of the Pharaohs' time in later Egypt. Either artists had come from the east to make them on the Nile, or the early Egyptians had seen the work of better artists in the east and had copied it.
The only other lions in truly archaic art had been found in the stone figures of China. These Chinese monster-lions were much later, and the only thing remarkable about them was that no such beasts seemed to exist in China. They had been copied from animals seen elsewhere, probably in central Asia.
This meant that possibly artists had lived and depicted lions in remote antiquity somewhere between the Tigris and Euphrates and the rivers of China long before the arts had developed in Egypt, Chaldea, or China, all on the outskirts of Eurasia.
Eurasia. The greatest land mass, the heart of it least known of all the remaining continents. How much, Jacob pondered, did he himself know of the depths of Eurasia, from the river of Baghdad to the Great Wall of China? Until very recently deserts and mountain barriers and isolated, hostile peoples had kept out all but a few explorers from the West. Legends had gathered around this heart of a continent. The legends had told of tribes wandering there in the dawn world after the retreat of the glacial ice, of an earthly paradise upon a height to the eastward, of a fabulous kingdom of the Christian, Prester John, encircled by deserts, and of roads that led to the Cathay of Marco Polo.
Then for a generation the frontiers of the Soviet Union had enclosed inner Eurasia.
Behind all the legends might lie one truth. Perhaps in this heart of a continent, and not in the farther east or west, man's first civilization had arisen.
Jacob soon had a cross-bearing on this supposition. Daoud's second riddle had been, where East and West first met. That had no meaning, unless. . .He riffled through the works on early Chinese art quickly. Bronzes, again. In the dawn before history, in the time of the Shang, the people had splendid bronze vessels and mirrors—superior to those made later. No modern authority could explain these Shang bronzes. Apparently the first of them had been brought in to the lands of the Yellow River. Like those brought in to Ramsar, Jacob thought. They had been carried in from the west, from the interior of Asia, and after a while the men of the Yellow River had learned how to copy them, only crudely. Again, mysterious bronzes had originated somewhere northeast of the Tigris. . .
But the Tower of Babel did not fit in all this. The Tower of Babel was built because of it. That was in Biblical times, many millenniums later.
Turning to Genesis, he glanced down the lines: And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there. . . .And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar.
And they said. . .let us build us a city, and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven. . . .
From this mighty tower of legend men began to speak in strange tongues and were scattered over the face of the earth. So much the Biblical writings had to say of the people that came from the east and crossed the Tigris to build the huge conical towers, the ziggurats which still revealed traces of their ruins along the great plain of the Tigris. That had not been so long ago in the archaeological time scale. But why had the towerlike structures been built, reaching up into the sky?
These primitive skyscrapers were within the cities, and probably the builders sought to reach cooler air, far above the housetop level. Still. . .
Jacob stopped abruptly when his eye caught a reference in one work. The people built the Tower-of-Babel structures to remind them of the mountains of their own homeland.
Three days after he had first shown him the bronze horse, Jacob returned to Daoud's office and waited for tea to be brought. "I have the answer to your riddles," he said. "Araman is a valley rather high up in a mountain chain, not so very far to the northeast of here, where the ancestors of the Biblical folk lived before they came down to these waters of Babylon to build their towers. The West and the Far East first met there because people of this land and of China went there to get some superbly made art, like your bronzes and my horse."
Daoud looked at him in silence. "Who has been talking to you?"
"I've been talking to myself long enough. It's your turn now."
"Well, you are right, as far as we know. Except that we——" He hesitated. "We've taken photographs of your winged horse. The director is very pleased."
"That wasn't what you started to say, Daoud."
"We are really thankful to you, Jacob. I wish——" He opened the drawer beside him, removed the bronze Pegasus, and then the object wrapped in white silk. With a quick gesture he unrolled this. "I—I'd like your opinion about it, please."
Examining it, Jacob recognized another specimen of the Araman bronze, different only in that it was worn smooth and dark by continued handling until the metal fairly shone. It seemed to be a pen case ornamented in a grapevine design, with a prowling lion among the leaves. When the top was removed, a slender pen slid out. This was cut from a reed, its tip discolored by ink or paint.
"It's a very old bronze pen case, like the other things in style."
"The same bronze alloy. We've tested it."
Jacob looked up, amused. "I might believe that some chosen people worked bronze several millenniums before anyone else—or tamed wild horses. But even you wouldn't say that your ancestors of the mountains of Eurasia wrote with pens millenniums before the first pictographs were carved."
Daoud did not rise to the jest. "It was strange—you thought out what we had found out."
"Not when we were both thinking along the same lines. Wishful thinking, Daoud." Jacob surveyed his friend. "I suppose you have a specimen of the Aramanac—or whatever it is—writing up your sleeve."
This time the Arab scientist smiled. Taking up the bronze pen case, he shook it, and a narrow slip of paper fell out.
Upon it Jacob read words written in an angular hand in ink: With the compliments of Araman.
"And so ends the chapter," he chuckled. "Aramanians write English on modern paper."
"Look at it again."
The only thing odd about the inscription was the height of the letters, which seemed to have been done with an up-and-down motion. This was vaguely familiar, and Jacob remembered that Germans of the old school still formed their letters that way in script.
Daoud nodded. "The pen case was left in the museum ten days ago on one of our exhibits of bronzes. The attendants do not know who left it, because many people were here in groups that day—soldiers and tribesmen."
Evidently, the Arab added, the bearer had slipped it out of his pocket when the attendants were not looking. It had been found when the rooms were cleaned the next morning.
"Whoever it was had a sense of humor," Jacob pointed out. "The joke is on you, and my horse is really Pegasus, and——"
"The bronze is not modern. And I saw the other two pieces dug out of the earth at the prehistoric level."
"Then it's a good joke, Daoud."
"The name of Araman, or Aorman, is known to my people—to the Kurdish tribes
beyond the Tigris."
"All right. Then your Kurdish tribes found some rather ancient bronzes buried in their mountains, sold several to dealers, and brought one to the museum and left it there. It has happened before."
"With an inscription in English?"
"Why not, for a joke?"
"I don't think it was a joke. There is an Englishman who lives in our Kurdish mountains—Mr. Bigsby. But he wouldn't make letters like a German. I think someone sent the pen case to the museum for us to see." Daoud looked up quickly. "I am going to the Kurdish mountains—I will have a vacation which begins in a few days." He was still watching Jacob. "Why do you always travel alone?"
Jacob was thinking: he would like to get out of Baghdad; he wanted to escape from this thronged city that was like the congestion of Cairo. Obviously Daoud Khalid hoped to find some more of the unexplained bronzes. Such a search for archaeological finds was a tremendous gamble; you might stumble over a goddess carved upon the gem of a signet ring and dig up a palace on the spot, as happened at Knossos; or you might accumulate a treasure of an unknown literature, only to find your discovery to be the penmanship of an adroit forger such as Rudolf Hoernle had found at Kashgar.
"No one has wanted to tag around with me," he muttered, and made his decision. "No, Daoud, I won't bother you by tagging along. But I'll take off tomorrow for Kirkuk and the northeast. I'll work up into the mountains from the Rowanduz road"—he knew the map of that mountain region by heart—"and see what I can find."
"Such as what?"
"Such as more horses like mine. You can find me easily enough when you come up."
Daoud handed over the bronze horse, reflecting, obviously pleased. "Oh, I could find you easily, but could you find me? Are you really coming, Jacob? I thought Americans never strayed from their hotels and offices and cinemas. They have never been in these mountains. Where would you go?"