A Garden to the Eastward

by Harold Lamb

  "When do we reach the bell tower, Jacob?"

  "We don't."

  "We do, when we find my bell. It will be a huge one, and somebody must have been very clever to hang it up here."

  Being with Michal had changed this day from all the days that had gone before. His thoughts were not complete or satisfactory unless he shared them with her. He liked to ride a little behind her, to see her head turn when she answered him. And he wondered if she really expected to find a huge bell somewhere. Cast in bronze—there had been makers of bronze in Araman. Only Christian churches had bells. . .

  "Those eagles," exclaimed Michal, "keep flying into the cliff."

  "Darbatash" called Badr, swinging his horse to face them.

  The Gate of the Fire, for which the monastery's site had been named. It was there in reality. Jacob noticed a wide depression before him filled with a spate of stones extending fanwise from a chasm in the cliff.

  This break in the natural wall of granite might have escaped their notice if Badr had not headed toward it. Jacob would have crossed the spate of stones without wondering how they came to be there. Now he saw them for what they were, the rubble in the bed of a small river that had flowed out from the chasm at some remote time.

  Badr, at least, appeared to think this might be a passage leading into the mountains. Jacob had gambled on the chance that Father Hyacinth had gone that way after seeing the photograph and observing Daoud go over the cliff. And on the probability that the silent Badr would not start out with Michal in his charge unless he knew some route to the mountain of the photograph.

  "Is this where we go in?" Michal asked, interested.

  "I think so. Badr calls it a gate of fire."

  "The wind seems to be trying to keep us out, Jacob."

  As they neared the mouth of the narrow gorge they were buffeted by wind gusts that tore through the opening. Until then the cliff had protected them in a measure from the air currents of the heights. Now they had to push into the shadow of the chasm against the tangible force of the air.

  At times the rock surfaces almost met overhead, and they probed their way upward into tunnellike obscurity, between eroded walls, polished smooth by wind and water. Underfoot the debris was dry, and Jacob guessed that it had been carried down by the wash of rainfall rather than by the flow of a stream. Up here, he reflected, the rivers had changed their ancient courses. The chasm itself, so far as he could determine, ran due east.

  When the light failed, Badr dismounted where the floor shelved up sharply and boulders gave them protection from the wind. As a sign that they were to sleep here, he took the burden off the pack horse. Watching him, Jacob was reminded how few were their possessions. They had a bundle of cold food and a jar of water from the monastery and their own sleeping gear. If Badr, who valued Michal's comfort, had been willing to go into the heights with no more than this, it meant that the Kurd expected to find supplies not too far away.

  After dark they were given proof that Badr was taking them toward an objective known to him. Taking Jacob's hand, he led them up a few yards and pointed ahead. At first they could make out nothing except the narrow pattern of stars overhead. One star below the others gleamed red. Its light dwindled and grew stronger, as if a flame in it shifted, and that meant it must be a fire lit on the surface of the earth, not in the reaches of the sky. "Atash" said the Kurd, without excitement.

  He had known where to look for the light; he had expected it to be there. When Jacob returned an hour later to this observation point, the red eye of light shone as before.

  When he stretched out on his blanket and pulled it over his body, he felt Michal's hand searching for his. Her fingers closed around his wrist so that when his own heartbeat quieted he felt the pulse that beat between them. Studying the sky overhead to determine in what direction they were journeying, he thought that they themselves were moving not so much toward a destination as onward through time.

  It helped Michal, he thought, to live in this way hour by hour and to play with the passing moments as if finding companionship in them. He heard her voice: "Jacob, you didn't hear the bell again at vesper time?"

  There was no use, he thought, in pretending they might not hear it in the ravine. "No, of course not," he replied confidently. "Bells have one peculiarity: they are quiet unless somebody rings them."

  Her low, satisfied laugh answered not so much his words as the assurance of his voice. The invisible bell had become important to her. So might a young girl have hugged close to herself a doll when she relaxed to sleep.

  The next day the veil of the heights was drawn over them. They ascended through the murk of a cloud. This impalpable curtain cooled them, caressing their flesh while they hauled themselves from ledge to ledge, leading up the horses.

  Once started, Michal climbed easily, her light body moving without apparent effort. Jacob had to force his heavy frame ahead by the thrust of his good leg, and the effort told on him. At times Badr took the bags from the pack horse and carried them up a steep gradient. He seemed to be untiring.

  Jacob never realized when they reached the summit of the gorge. On either side the slopes had receded into the gray curtain and the sky overhead had lightened. Leading his horse forward, he looked for the next ascent, too weary to think of anything except the ground underfoot. The walking became easier, and he noticed that he was on a path.

  Then he came out of the haze, seeing the path traced in a field of grass. Overhead he was aware of the blue of the sky.

  He was standing, arrested, at the edge of a valley. Around it rose serried peaks. From gray to purple they reared to white veins that must be snow upon peaks incredibly distant. Like a barrier, they ringed the valley, whose dark green was shot with the flame of beds of poppies in bloom. The mountains had opened out, to disclose this hidden recess.

  Midway across the valley rose an isolated conical peak. Alone, it was regular in outline, up to the flattened summit. It differed from the others in its coloring, a tawny gray, Jacob did not need to look at the photograph he carried. This was the valley centering upon the single mount of the photograph, the one Sir Clement said might be Araman.

  He felt no surprise, except at the unusual silence after the many sounds of the gorge. And he had not been prepared for the stark colors of these heights where the encircling peaks appeared lighter than the ground, or the deeper blue of the sky along the horizon. Quick steps came behind him.

  "It's lovely," Michal observed. "But what is it?"

  He laughed in sheer relief from tension, remembering that she had not heard the arguments for and against Araman. "What does it remind you of, Michal?"

  "The valley of Interlaken," she said promptly, "with a hill where the lake should be."

  "That hill, as you call it, may be what we're looking for."

  Michal pondered and drew a long breath like a favored child ready to answer at school. "Is it Khufru's pyramid by the Mena house, with its top cut off? No? Well, it looks a little like the Acropolis at Athens, or—let me think—something seen in India. Some kind of a tower." And she smiled up at him triumphantly, indifferent to the tawny mount, but pleased with his new mood.

  "You haven't really looked at it. It's much higher than your pyramid. Those black specks along the foot are people like us, most of them mounted."

  Briefly she concentrated on the distant height. "It's curious—it is familiar, Jacob, but I don't know why. What are we going to do with it?"

  "We're going to find out." Jacob could not hide his eagerness.

  Without waiting for Badr, they started across the plain, the tired horses breaking into a gallop over the grassy footing. Jacob was intent on the solitary cone. There was no danger of losing sight of it, and it proved to be far distant, as he had expected, and great in height. As they neared it in the early afternoon, he guessed it to be four or five hundred feet above the plain. So steeply did the sides angle up that he found it difficult to believe it was not a man-made mound—certainly its upward lift w
as sharper than that of the Great Pyramid or of Vesuvius.

  While he meditated, Michal rode by him effortlessly, singing to herself.

  They were approaching the west face, and Jacob veered toward the south. That had been marked as the entrance side on the German's photograph, and a group of riders, moving slowly around the base, had stopped on that side. They looked like Kurds and seemed to be shifting their loads there by a stream, under a solitary tree. Jacob noticed several watercourses threading the valley, and decided that this might be the source of his river that had gone underground. Probably, millenniums ago, another river had flowed down the gorge that had served them for an entrance-way.

  The excitement in him grew with the race over the flowered grass, and he breathed deep of the mountain air, sharper than that of the Riyat ravine. The mount loomed higher above him, baffling as before. It looked unclimbable, and he could make out nothing of what might be on the summit, except a glimpse of treetops.

  Intent on the height above him, Jacob hardly observed the Kurdish horsemen at work under a tree opening their black packs and laying out an assortment of sacks and piles of fruit and some rolled-up rugs. He assumed that they were making camp. And he regretted afterward that in his haste he had paid so little attention to them. Vaguely he noticed that no rifles were visible, and that they formed two groups, only one of which wore the small shawl turban of the higher mountain tribes.

  What held his attention was a faint dark line running diagonally up the stone face of the south side of the mound. Only when he came within stone's throw could he be certain that the line was made by steps hewn into the rock—forming no proper stairway but offering a way for one person to climb up at a time.

  Michal, however, was more concerned with a towerlike projection at the foot of the stair.

  "Jacob!" she cried. "There's my campanile and the bell itself!"

  "What?"

  She pointed at the slender tower which did indeed have a sizable bell hanging under the cupola. Its bright green surface showed that it must be of bronze long exposed to the weather. In all the valley this bell tower alone offered evidence of human purpose, and Jacob reined his horse over to it hurriedly. The tribesmen watched him curiously but without surprise or uneasiness.

  Over the narrow door of the bell tower letters had been carved in the stone. At first he thought them to be Hebrew and then recognized them as early Armenian script, of the type he had seen in manuscripts in the library of Mar Giorgios.

  Suddenly he laughed. The explanation of the bell tower might be simple indeed. It had been built by Christian Armenians a good many centuries before, but in no remote historical age. And Mar Shimun had told the truth when he had said that the bell they heard was the bell of Mar Giorgios. No doubt they had heard it often enough.

  Still there must be a reason why it had been erected here at the steps. Glancing over at the tree, Jacob observed a rude stone shrine of the kind he had seen at the bridge the first night out of Riyat. Here, at this outdoor altar, the migrating tribesmen were piling some of their stuff. The steps leading up the mount were flanked, then, by an early Christian campanile and a mountain shrine, two things by no means remarkable in themselves.

  Getting off his horse, he called to Michal, and started for the steps. But Michal looked stubborn.

  "Must we go up to look at the view just now?" she murmured. "This tree is very inviting, and we'll have to wait for Badr to arrive for lunch."

  In his excitement he hardly heard her. Now that he was close to it, the slope revealed itself as eroded rock. This, then, was no volcanic cone, or any immense pyramid built by the hands of men. It was not corded lava but calcined rock.

  "Water shaped it!" he cried.

  The strangely smooth surface, almost bare of earth, shone with streaks of alabaster and limelike calcium. For geologic ages water must have dripped down this slope, forming its deposits that flashed like inset gems in the sunlight. And if water had dripped for so long, there must be a lake on the summit, fed by subterranean springs, which were in turn the sources of the rivers flowing from this valley.

  The only way up seemed to be by the steps; they must lead to the top.

  "Michal, there's a lake up there," he exclaimed, "and trees, and God knows what else. Daoud and Father Hyacinth may be there!"

  The fever of restlessness in him would not let him delay to please her.

  "Why must you climb the steps, Jacob?" she demanded instantly.

  Angered, he started forward. Slipping by him, Michal ran up the first steps and staggered, on the smooth stone, in her small riding boots. Sitting down doggedly, she drew off her leather riding boots and went on easily, but keeping close to the slope, feeling for holds with her free hand. Glancing down, Jacob saw that they were climbing sharply. Below them, Badr had dismounted at the tree, to watch.

  "He has more sense than we have," Michal muttered.

  "Don't look back," he warned her impatiently when she hesitated.

  "Then keep close to me," she retorted. "And be very glad there isn't a wind!"

  Afterward he remembered only how she kept near him, moving easily and surely over the treacherous footing, for many of the steps had been so worn that they were little more than wet hollows in the slope, circling the height as they led up. Water dripped steadily in deep channels. If the wind of the gorge had beat against them here, they could not have gone on. If there had been water in the gorge that morning, they could not have reached the valley.

  Some of the steps had been repaired; there was no telling how long ago they had been made.

  "If I drop a shoe, it will be a long way to go to pick it up." Her voice came back to him, cheerful now. "We're almost at the top of the ladder, Jacob."

  Then he was standing with her in a level space, a fresh breeze touching him, the strain and anxiety forgotten. They were in the empty gateway of a wall, and the wall was built of massive limestone blocks fitted together without mortar or dowels. A cyclopean wall a dozen feet thick.

  On one side of the entrance projected a head, so worn away that Jacob could only conjecture that it had been a lion's, with a pair of wings. Michal regarded it somberly as she put on her boots, and Jacob was glad of the respite to get his breath.

  Not till long afterward did he reflect that the climb had been dangerous, that a single break in the cracked rock underfoot would have projected them out into space. He had not thought of Michal falling; if she had slipped, he would have caught her. Nor did he wonder why those who had used this fragile stair had devised no handhold for it. Least of all did he reason then that those who had lived on the summit of this towerlike height would have been safe from attack, until artillery was invented.

  Instead, at that moment he felt rested; he moved through the open gate with Michal as if coming home.

  This sense of well-being affected him physically. The eyestrain of the outer approach was relieved by the dark growth of wild oaks and walnuts inside the gate; even the encircling wall was overgrown with ivy, and had, moreover, fallen into rubble in many places. To his surprise he noticed some dwarf firs and birches. A vagrant flock of sheep grazed in a clear space among wild oleanders and moved away only lazily at their approach. Pigeons circled among the treetops.

  Sighting the gleam of water ahead, he went toward it instinctively, and found himself on the edge of a narrow lake. The water seemed clear and deep; when he plunged his hand into it, it proved to be icy to the touch, and he decided it must come from springs deep in the rock below.

  A faint rushing sound at the lower end indicated that the water flowed out over a fall.

  "I think I hear a wheel turning," Michal whispered. "I should know."

  Poised at the lake's edge, she looked around without surprise, as if this woodland were hers. There was, after all, nothing remarkable about it except that it should be there. The verdure was that of a northern climate, of the Adirondacks or England. But this hilltop would be much colder than the semi-desert valleys far below. Jacob observed
bees passing toward a line of hives along the shore, not of wood but of clay.

  Michal smiled up at him suddenly. "I'm sorry I was cross. It's so lovely up here. Shall we sit in the grass and just look, or explore the village, Jacob?"

  The village, as she called it, caused Jacob a disappointment that he hid from her. At the upper end of the lake the outlines of dwellings could be traced clearly against the limestone summit that gleamed in the late-afternoon sun. They rose lazily on easy terraces, in pueblo fashion, looking like a small Swiss village without the inevitable church spire. The open space in the upper level was empty of life.

  In fact he could discern no sign of movement among the habitations. Over the lake and village lay a quiet so deep that it seemed as if he and Michal might wander from end to end of the place without disturbing the activity of one bee or pigeon. It seemed as if human beings did not exist, physically, in this community of the heights.

  A current of air stirred the trees. A low musical note echoed over the lake, growing in volume.

  "What would that be?" Jacob wondered.

  Michal listened attentively. The note wandered up and down a scale, changing evasively. "It's a wind instrument. It couldn't be an oboe?"

  The treetops rustled again, and the invisible musician rang in changes on his scale. "It's nice," Michal murmured, "but it would have to be a very big oboe, wouldn't it?"

  By one accord they moved toward the dwellings, quickening their pace to the accompaniment of the soft obbligato. The first thing that caught Jacob's attention was a sundial.

  It stood on a marble pedestal, bronze, like any other sundial except that it was square in shape, with a slender vertical shaft for gnomon. And it had no numerals, Roman or otherwise.

  The line of the sun's shadow fell near the eleventh mark at the edge of the base. The hands on Jacob's watch pointed to a little after five. The fifth hour of the watch was then the eleventh of the dial. So the day of the sundial must have begun at sunrise.