by Harold Lamb
"Why not?" Jacob pressed the point. "We must be somewhere near the junction of the frontiers of Iraq and Iran and Turkey and not far from the Soviet area."
Daoud's voice sharpened. "Look at the lines. They run every which way, straight across mountain ranges and rivers. The men who drew them were sitting in Versailles drawing lines on maps to please each other. Had one of them been here in this land? No."
Baba Beg laughed with little amusement. "The Herki go what way they wish," he said proudly. "The frontiers, where are they? The eagles, they do not see them. No, the frontiers are where the armies are. My father said it."
Evidently what Mullah Ismail had said to be so was law to his son. And Jacob reflected that his own map, accepted as ultimate fact in the office at Cairo, seemed to the people of these hills to be filled with mistakes.
Meanwhile Baba Beg had produced from his tent a document of his own. When he unrolled it at the fireside, Jacob saw a proclamation published upon gloss paper. It was in a fine Arabic script that he could not read. So he expressed his admiration of the beautiful colored border.
"At-lanticchar-ter," said the boy.
At sight of this document the audience edged closer to the rug, the minstrel taking his stand nearest, as by right. There was utter silence, except for the shuffling movements of animals. Daoud glanced at it with misgivings. "It's an Arabic copy of your Atlantic Charter," he informed Jacob; "you know—the thing about the right of small peoples to self-government."
Baba Beg assented eagerly. "When?" he asked.
Daoud had been reading through the text in his careful manner. "It says printed by American War Information Office." He spoke as if to Baba Beg, but meaning Jacob to take heed of his words. "The Kurds think this document promises them independence. They ask when that will be?"
Daoud swept his arm across the night sky. There were millions of Kurds, he said, five or six million of Kurds who had dwelt since time began in the mountains in all directions from here. On the map they were divided up between the frontier lines of Iraq and Turkey, Iran and the Soviet Union—the lines laid down by treaties made in Paris after the last war. The numbers of these Kurds were not known in the outer world; they had been forgotten after the treaties; they had been divided by lines on the new maps, and often they had fought the armies of each new country, in the fastness of their mountains, for their right to use the Kurdish language and to rule themselves. They did not want their language to die; they did not want to lose their entity as a people. They wished their share of the Four Freedoms and of the right promised in the Atlantic Charter.
"They say the name of Kurd is not spoken outside their mountains," Daoud concluded, his eyes admonishing Jacob, "and as a people they have been condemned to die without a hearing. Yet they exist and their land of Kurdistan exists."
"Yes," cried Baba Beg. A murmur went through the listeners, who had not understood the words but had caught their sense. Jacob saw the boy of the bridge keeper watching at the edge of the carpet as if it were his privilege, because he had carried the message to the Herki. Father Hyacinth was lighting a long bamboo pipe, drawing a smoldering stick from the fire.
"When," cried Baba Beg, tossing his head, "will the promise be kept?"
Jacob put aside his own pipe. "Baba Beg," he said—thankful that Daoud had gained time for him to think—"it may be a long time."
"Long?"
Unconsciously Jacob spoke as if to a child. "The Charter tells only what we would like to do. How it is to be done neither we nor the British know as yet."
"No!" The son of Mullah Ismail cried out something at Daoud, who puzzled over it before interpreting.
"Ah, yes. The treaty of Sèvres. He says indep—autonomy was granted to the Kurds by that treaty. Was it?"
Dubiously Jacob thought back to the abortive treaty that had conceded Istanbul and the Dardanelles and islands in the Mediterranean to the Russians, Iraq itself to the British, under mandate, a share in the oil of Iraq to the French, and part ownership in that oil to the United States. In nineteen-twenty. Yes, there had been something about an independent Armenia and an autonomous Kurdistan.
"But that treaty was never signed," he said.
Antagonistic now, the boy faced him. "Was the At-lanticchar-ter signed?" he demanded.
"I don't know, Baba Beg."
"My father says Europeans do not keep a promise until they sign. And perhaps they do not keep it if they sign."
The silence held around them.
"Why do they make a promise?" insisted the boy.
Jacob could think of no answer that would be honest.
"Al Akrad al jinni kashafa allahu 'inhamu 'l ghita',' said Daoud quickly, and the boy relaxed, smiling a little.
"It is one of their proverbs," the archaeologist explained, "that the Kurds are jinn, hidden away until God draws the curtain from them."
But the good feeling of the feasting had changed to restlessness. Baba Beg no longer spoke English; he went to stand moodily by the fire's edge. Sharp argument rose in small explosions as the listeners discussed what they had heard. There was a snarl as the minstrel grappled bodily another man. For a moment the two struggled on the carpet, then separated. Knives flashed instantly between them, and the singer of the folk song fell to the rug, hurt. Picking himself up, he walked away from the guests, still with his swagger, taking no apparent notice of the blood running from his arm.
Father Hyacinth emptied his pipe with a sigh.
"You are too honest, Jacob," said Daoud. "You should have made a patriotic speech like me, or smoked your pipe in silence like the father here. But on the whole it gained something. We will always have a refuge with the Herki because we have eaten their curds and whey." He looked at his friend, amused. "You see, they keep promises."
When the Herki riders turned back the next day at the stone cairn that marked the limit of the tribe's grazing land, they made a picture that touched Jacob's memory. Wrapped in bright tartans and black sheepskins, they waited to give honor to the parting, sending after the travelers the faint falsetto melody of flutes and pipes.
And, listening, Jacob became aware of something odd in these highlanders of the East. The boy who had carried the message, the son of Mullah Ismail, the proud minstrel, all had one thing in common—a hope, an eagerness to discover what they did not know. Their minds were alive and restless. This was not the case elsewhere with isolated mountain folk like the Alpine Swiss. He wondered if outsiders had ventured among them before. Casually—for he dared not question too directly—he asked Father Hyacinth if visitors came by the monastery of Darbatash.
The priest shrugged. He himself had come, and the English gentleman, and now this American monsieur.
"No more?" Jacob wondered.
"There are, of course, the wanderers."
He might have meant the people eternally drifting through the ridges. But the word had been inscribed on the plaque Sir Clement had seen in the church. Father Hyacinth betrayed no interest; he appeared immovable as the rocks beside the track, avoiding obscurities. Yet he had taken time to answer.
Daoud felt no concern for the political kaleidoscope; his heart lay among the objects of metal and stone preserved under the earth. Last night in the camp he had discovered a bronze utensil shaped like a spoon, used by children as a toy. Those children ate with their fingers, yet somebody in this place had made a spoon millenniums before.
Rubbing the small shape of bronze clean with his scarf, he shook his head. "It has little value because we cannot tell where it came from."
The rampart of earth over which they plodded was marked by the dark lines of wine grapes and flocks of grazing sheep. The human beings here lived upon the animals and seed planted in earth; they made their summer houses of goat's hair, their clothing of sheep's wool; half their food came from the milk and meat of the herds, as did all their boots and the trappings of the horses. What did they sell for money?
"What would they do with paper money?" Daoud countered absently, a
nd smiled. "Once Sir Clement gave a bank note to Ibrahim at the black bridge."
"Who?"
"Ibrahim—Abraham. Next morning Abraham started a fire with it. He could not exchange a bank note up here, but he needed paper for the fire."
They sold some barley and hides for coins, Daoud admitted. The women used many of the coins for bracelets and anklets. "Oh, they can make money, as you say, out of a weed."
"Such as what?"
Laughing, Daoud pocketed the bronze spoon. "What you and the father are making into fire at this minute. The Kurds grow fine tobacco on the lower slopes."
The price of the tobacco yield, he explained, was fixed by the outer governments, and the tribesmen had to take what was given them—only a fraction of the price obtained by merchants in the cities. Jacob reflected that few among the Kurds smoked tobacco. They raised it for the outer world, and it would best suit the convenience of that outer world to disarm these primitive tribesmen and turn them into docile cultivators of a weed that would burn with a peculiar smoke.
There was nothing in this contact with the outside to explain the excitement that was like a fever in the Herki and Mullah Ismail's men.
Father Hyacinth only smiled over his pipe, and Jacob wondered how much the silent priest had understood of their talk. The priest remarked that at the monastery they preserved the ancient scripts of the mountains. He himself was bibliothéquaire of Darbatash.
Jacob had another impression that could not easily be rationalized. He made no attempt to do so, because he was seeking impressions rather than trying to account for them. Each day, he felt, they had climbed to a new level. It was not like ascending the reaches of a single mountain. These daily levels permitted them to move along freely, as if they were ascending the stairs of a step-back building.
Now, in the late afternoon, they were rounding a shoulder beneath a sheer wall of granite that hid the heights above. On Jacob's left, down the slope, lay a cloud curtain, hiding the lowlands. He looked down on the slowly shifting surface of white clouds into which the sun would disappear presently.
By no effort of his own had he come to this elevation over the clouds. First Mr. Parabat's kindness had advanced him a stage, to the care of the bridge keeper, and then to the aid of the son of Mullah Ismail. On his shoulders he wore a long sheepskin coat, the leather side out, a gift from the Herki. There could not be much about him now to recall Captain Jacob Ide of the cafés of Cairo.
"The monastery," said Father Hyacinth, pointing as the sun dimmed out.
Jacob could see nothing along the granite wall rising from the angle of detritus at its foot. Certainly no outline of a building showed. After a while he picked out a series of black specks in the face of the rock, which he judged to be caves. Then below them he noticed that the slide of rock assumed regularity. Some structure had been built out of the loose stones, almost concealed from observation. Still farther down the slope he picked out the shape of vineyards and cultivated fields. But a man who was not looking for the monastery might have passed it by, so utterly did it merge into the stone face of the mountain.
Father Hyacinth explained the caves. The earliest monks, he said, had hollowed out the caves in order to live in peace beyond the reach of animals and armed men. Only a little while ago, a few centuries ago, their successors had moved down into the modern monastère for convenience' sake.
"Myself," he added pleasantly, "I add books to the library by selling the dried flowers to Messieurs Parabat Frères."
The next day, sitting cross-legged in his cell nursing a pipe which refused to draw properly at that altitude, Jacob faced the fact that the road had come to an end at the monastery.
The river itself had left him. Somewhere back along the slope it had gone underground. While he could retrace his path to the river's ravine, he could not expect to follow its course through the bowels of the mountain on which the monastery stood.
Aboveground the way ahead was filled with slides and sharp rock screes between the cliff and the cloud strata. Without wings it did not seem possible to proceed in any direction except back the way they had come.
Jacob had every chance for meditation because he had been given one of the upper hermits' caves, reached by steps cut into the rock—steps worn smooth and round by long use. This cell, a dozen feet deep, did not permit him to stand up. It provided a bed of dried heather overlaid with a black felt robe and quilts; it afforded heat at night from a small fire that burned in a niche within the rear wall of stone. Before that niche two hollows had been made in the floor by the knees of those who had prayed there during the centuries, he was told. The niche faced east.
For other comfort, the cell contained a silver basin, a clay jug filled with the monastery's strong red wine, a pitcher of goat's milk, a dish of dried curds, pomegranates, and strips of unleavened bread. The carpet upon which he sat bore the design of a rude horseman. By now Jacob knew the name of this horseman and his story.
Daoud occupied the adjacent cell; but Daoud was asleep, in no humor for discussion.
"Sir Clement did some daydreaming," the archaeologist had vouchsafed. "Baba Beg has the right idea. This eyrie is nothing but a hideaway for old men."
Daoud, the ascetic, did not use tobacco or taste wine. He had no sympathy for these black-garbed folk who dug industriously in the vineyard during the morning hours and often copied stained ancient illuminations by candlelight. Ahl-kitab, he called them, people of the book. They copied sayings and legends of antiquity that would be forgotten otherwise—so Daoud insisted—instead of performing surgical operations on the earth to divulge its secrets. They were iconophiles, ghosts feeding themselves on memories and scents of dead flowers—images themselves, saved from the early time when the apostles of Christianity had walked the earth.
Actually, the denizens of Darbatash appeared both ignorant and simple to Jacob—Arabs, Turks, Persians, Armenians who had entered the monastery to find peace of mind. Except for Father Hyacinth and the patriarch, Mar Shimun (Simon) none of them had been farther west than Syria. Mar Shimun had wisps of white hair projecting from his black skullcap; his lined old eyes had gleamed like a raven's when he greeted the strangers at table the night before.
No one except the silent librarian spoke any language that Jacob could command.
Mar Shimun laughed when he said that already the peoples of the world below were coming up to the monastery. First an Inglisi, then an Allmani, then an American. When Daoud interpreted, Jacob realized that the patriarch had spoken of an Englishman, a German, and himself, an American. The German, then, might be Vasstan, concerning whom Father Hyacinth had kept silence.
Was it not true, Mar Shimun demanded, that the nations of the world below had been tearing at one another, to destroy themselves, for a generation or more? Up in the monastery they had heard of that, and they were waiting for the consequences.
"The old chap expects the survivors to jolly well come running up here for shelter," Daoud put in. "He thinks you three are the forerunners of the exodus from your three countries."
Apparently the jolly Mar Shimun did think so. He asked what the nations of the world were doing to avert this last great calamity.
Jacob tried to explain that an organization of the victorious united nations was being effected, to control destructive weapons and to try in its court the quarrels of its members.
"But not of all the nations?" persisted Mar Shimun.
"No."
"Yet the war was of all the nations. Yes, the seventh war of the world."
"The seventh?" Jacob had been interested. "Why that?"
Mar Shimun believed that the first world conflict had been some twenty-four centuries before, when his people of the east fought with the Yunnanis (the Greeks—Marathon and Salamis, Jacob reflected). That had been before the apostles went forth to preserve peace and churches like this on the height of Darbatash were founded.
When the bronzed bearded men around him nodded sagely at his words, Mar Shimun drank dee
p from his wine goblet and explained.
"It is something about a revelation written by a saint named John," Daoud grumbled. "It's simple rot!"
"Never mind," Jacob encouraged him, having a suspicion who might have spoken the words first. "How does it go?"
For a few moments Daoud listened. "Mar Shimun thinks it is a prophecy of things which must be hereafter. Now it's four beasts, including a lion with wings and a flying eagle. . .Hullo, here's a rider on a white horse and another on a red horse. The red horse rider has power to blast the earth. Perhaps a fire myth. . .Now something's really happening: the stars of the sky are falling into the earth, and the sky is rolling up—that's in the Koran too—and the mountains and islands are moving. Here are details of the slaughter: the kings of the earth and the big fellows and millionaires, and generals, and free voters, and slaves will come to hide themselves in the rocks of the mountains and in some way to pull the mountains over them. It sounds like an air-raid panic or fissional energy let loose in a big way."
"It sounds like the chapter of Revelation by Saint John. Haven't you read it, Daoud?"
"No, but Mar Shimun does claim it to be a revelation of what is beginning to happen."
"Ask him why the fugitives should come here."
With his fourth wine cup, the patriarch had the answer to that.
"He says because here they can obtain the protection of Mar Giorgios—Saint George. That will help them to survive, I suppose."
"What has Saint George to do with Darbatash?"
"That warrior saint was born near a lake on a mountain somewhere around. That's point one—no particular importance. Point two is important. This church was consecrated to Saint George. You can see that for yourself, the patriarch says. For fifteen hundred years, more or less, candles have burned here in veneration of Saint George, or Giorgios, the great saint of the East."
"Is he supposed to be buried here?" Jacob asked quickly.
Daoud shook his head. "This is his church. You know, like Saint Peter's in Rome. All these ancient hives have a monopoly of something holy. I'm sorry, Jacob, but it's just palaver. I wanted to find out if they knew anything."