A Garden to the Eastward

by Harold Lamb

  Michal, indifferent to the sundial's peculiar numbering of hours, was contemplating an aged oak. A comfortable bench stretched around its gnarled bole.

  "Our musician ought to be sitting just there," she hazarded; "but he isn't there."

  No one appeared in the doorways of the stone houses clustered at the head of the lake. On the roofs trays of fruit—grapes and persimmons—stood drying in the sun. Jacob noticed that the dwellings had no windows; glancing into one, he saw that light came in through a central opening in the roof. Embers of a fire smoked beneath it in a bronze brazier.

  "Silk!" cried Michal suddenly. "White and flossy."

  Near the door she had discovered a hand loom on which a square of white silk hung taut. The bars of the loom had been shaped out of slender boles of trees, worn smooth with much use.

  Nowhere was any human being visible. Michal thought that the oboe or flute player must be farther away, and they went on, up broad steps, to an open space like a plaza. Here other buildings with colonnaded porches stood back against the rock summit. Grass thrust through the cracks between the great stones of the central space, and fruit trees fringed the base of the height beyond.

  "I think our concert is going on over there." Intrigued, Michal pointed out a house with a small square tower. This had narrow vents in the stone, and Jacob thought it might have been a pigeon tower, but found that he was mistaken. As they approached, the low notes of the scale sounded over their heads so softly that he could not be sure he actually heard them.

  Inside the entrance, they found themselves in a room with bright rugs underfoot and broad divans by the apertures in the wall.

  The faint echoes of melody came from a grilled opening in the roof, which was actually the base of the slender tower. Looking up into it, Michal could see the gleam of daylight through the opening. There was no sign of a musician in the tower, and she laughed. "It must be a radio, Jacob."

  He shook his head. In the hollow tower he made out a projecting box of dark wood against which strings stretched taut upon a metal framework. A breath of air down the tower raised the pitch of the half-heard melody.

  After a moment he satisfied himself that the sound varied with the wind. "There's your musician, Michal." He grinned. "And your wood and wind instrument."

  Doubtfully she peered up, suspecting she was being teased.

  "It's some aeolian harp thing," he explained. "The wind sets the strings to vibrating, and you hear whatever the wind chooses to play for you."

  "Truly?" She smiled up at him and considered the room carefully. The deep recess at one end had a frame of woven branches stretched across it instead of a bed frame, and the branches smelled pleasantly of pine resin. The only decoration of the "living room"' were two wall paintings, so dim that they could barely be seen in the faint light. Going closer, she found one to be a young shepherd with a harp on his knee.

  Jacob was watching her. "Long ago, when the night wind blew," he reflected aloud, "King David used to hear his harp sing where it hung over his bed."

  Head on one side, Michal studied the other painting in which a second man seemed to be leading a white beast from a growth of trees. "It's an elephant," she decided finally. "Jacob, I've never had a white elephant look me in the eye before. It's nice here." Slowly she revolved, considering. "There isn't any kitchen, and that's a blessing. I think it's going to be our house."

  "Ours?"

  "The instinct that tells me so is practically never wrong. It's really planning, not instinct." Her spirits rising, she smiled up at him. "You don't know, Jacob, but a woman is never fully content until she ferrets out a house to be hers. That is instinct. Now that we're here I might as well confess that I hated wandering around on horseback. And," she added quickly, "I'm not going down that spiral fire escape tonight. It's too late, anyway."

  Suddenly she paused, listening. Close to them sounded a slow tread of hoofs on stone. It stopped and then rushed away, as if some animal had seen or scented them and had taken fright. An animal, Jacob thought, smaller than a horse or grown deer—it sounded like a goat, yet from the door he could see nothing moving about the house.

  Michal came close to him. The flurry of sound had not disturbed her but she had sensed his uncertainty. "What is all this place?" she murmured. "Whoever could have planned it?"

  "What do you think?" he asked casually.

  Gravely she pondered. "It's odd. At first it seemed like a lovely mountain resort, but of course it can't be that. It's clean, and it doesn't smell in the least of mutton grease or human filth, like most of Asia."

  "On a mountaintop," he reminded her, "everything is washed by the rain and dried by the wind and burned clean by the sun. That's natural. Go on."

  Obediently she nodded, her eyes intent. And he wondered if she had not answered as a sensitive girl the questioning of older people, perhaps her father, in this way. He thought of the aeolian harp, so sensitive that it played at the wind's touch.

  "Uhhm—yes, Jacob. It's like the sleepy villages up in the Basque part of the Pyrenees, or the Bernese Oberland, where people still make things by hand. It's even nicer." Then she frowned. "But where have the people gone?"

  "Down the mountain probably. They ought to be back before dark." For a moment he reflected. "Does it bother you that they paint elephants and harpists on the walls of your house?"

  "The guesthouse? No. Some villagers still paint saints and things on their doors, or shrines. I admit the elephant intrigues me, but they do have white ones in Ceylon, don't they?" She was answering now with half her mind, the other half considering the details of the room. "They make fine old-fashioned rugs."

  "Very old-fashioned. Michal, do you realize you've seen nothing today that might not have existed here in the time of the Romans, or of Ulysses for that matter?"

  Michal laughed, without belief. What she had seen and heard she had accepted naturally. In this place she had found quiet and certain small comforts unperceived by Jacob, and evidently she was satisfied. "Now you're speaking archaeologically, and I don't know anything about that. What do the other experts say?"

  "Daoud thinks this might be a treasure-trove of bronzes, buried once and now dug up again."

  "More bronze horses?"

  "Yes. Sir Clement reasons that this stone mount may contain a tomb, relic, or sign much revered by the Kurdish tribes, who seem to guard it against intrusion. Or perhaps some modern saint might live here. But I don't remember that anyone objected to our coming," he added thoughtfully.

  "And what do you think?" She was interested now.

  "I don't know. I don't know a thing about it, Michal." Jacob hesitated. "Except that I have a queer feeling that this is a place to rest."

  Fleetingly he thought of Sir Clement's sealed notes in his pocket. Sheer relief flooded the woman's sensitive face. "That's exactly what it is," she approved.

  The clear tolling of a church bell sounded, striking on his fatigue with the effect of shock. The acoustics of this place were extraordinary, because the bell must be down at the foot of the steps.

  "My vesper bell!" Michal smiled triumphantly. "Let's see who is ringing, for what."

  It could be a summons, Jacob thought as they hurried down from the plaza, or it could be a warning, or merely a routine ringing at the vesper hour. When they reached the lion gate the first thing he noticed was the nomad tribe moving away over the plain along a road distinctly visible from that height.

  Scattered up the ascent, other figures were climbing the steps slowly. Jacob counted more than thirty as they came into view. Those nearest him, women and children mostly, were carrying baskets and rugs—the things that had been left by the visiting nomads. In the line of human forms toiling up the rock he recognized Badr, weighted down by Michal Thorne's luggage. She had sighted it also.

  "Look, Jacob! They are carrying in our bags—and we're going to stay."

  At that moment the bell ceased tolling. Whatever message it had sent out into the fantastic corridors of soun
d around the peaks was ended. With sunset the wind had dropped, and the melody of the harp was stilled. In this quiet of the air framed against the glow in the west Jacob saw for the first time a thin line of smoke rising from the highest point of the rocks behind him, as if from a sacrificial fire that burned without ceasing.

  Jacob could not escape a conviction that the people of the mountain had been expecting them. The fire on the peak, the clay lamps in which an oil flame flickered, the bronze trays of food brought in by Badr—trays with bronze heads of mountain sheep ornamenting the corners—the curds and whey, the sour milk and lentils and unleavened bread they ate reclining on a divan, the brightly clad woman who carried in a bronze caldron of hot water—all these he accepted as part of the mise en scène. They had the unreality of things and persons seen through the window of a plane by a passenger already disassociated from them because he is leaving them. Michal accepted them as readily as she had made herself at home in Mr. Parabat's garden. These people of the mount made no effort to speak to him, as if they had known beforehand that they would not be understood; only the younger children stared at the foreigners curiously. When they spoke, it was in a quick syllabic tongue that even Michal did not recognize. It did not sound as harsh as the Kurdish of Riyat.

  Michal had been occupied with the water in the sleeping compartment for some time; she had emerged silently in a fresh dress, and had knelt beside him, as if preoccupied with food but eating little. He thought: the sundial is dark, and the night has no hours here, the wind harp does not sound and we are very close to the stars, and still she accepts it as if it were a resort prepared for her.

  They walked out under a cloudless sky, surprised at the light that revealed objects far away.

  "Do you feel that this belongs to us?" he asked abruptly. Michal murmured, "There's no Mr. Parabat now."

  Turning up the steps toward the glow of the solitary fire—the same, Jacob thought, that he had sighted from the gorge—they passed giant figures carved in half-relief on the smooth face of rock beside them. A horseman stood there beneath a sun of stone, and before him knelt a man who appeared to be a Roman without armor. Michal drew close to Jacob, pointing out a living man near the fire.

  He was putting fresh fuel on the blaze. It shone red between the upraised wings of the altar, shifting with the vagrant air. The man, Jacob noticed, was tall; white hair gleamed on his head when he bent forward, drawing back long sleeves from his arms. He did not look like a priest. When he had finished with the fire he leaned against the outer parapet, motionless.

  Michal stirred restlessly; then putting her hand in Jacob's, she drew him toward the fire. She was trembling, as if with cold. Coming close to the small blaze, she studied it and glanced shyly at the watcher, who took no heed of them. His heavy frame and massive head held the patience of the rock itself.

  "Is he our night watchman?" Jacob wondered.

  "Our Watchman of the Night," she said quickly.

  They had been left to themselves. Even Badr had not taken his place, as usual, at the door of their quarters. In the darkness there was nothing more to see, only the glow of the fire this man kept up and the pattern of the stars. The glow touched Michal's hair and the pallor of her throat, making her fragile against the enveloping darkness which already had become familiar to them. Jacob felt the ache of desire for her deep within him.

  "I'm glad I put on a clean dress." Michal waited a moment and then said, "Shall we go home, Jacob?"

  They found their way back to the light in their house. The one lamp stood on the floor inside the threshold. Jacob would have liked to have carried her through the door. Awkwardly, he picked up the flickering lamp. When he looked at the bed, made up with quilts and blankets, he could find no place to put it. He snuffed out the flame with his fingers and turned suddenly, blindly toward Michal.

  When he waked, with Michal sleeping beside him, it was a moment before his memory convinced him that the two of them were alone among a strange people, and that Michal herself might be at his side that day and the next. Their life had that quality of unreality, whether they sat by the lamp or wandered the length of the cyclopean wall, exploring the tangles of vines and oleanders. Michal wanted to see everything, without questioning it; he felt disturbed by the quiet of the mount for which he could not account.

  As the days went by, he dreaded the encroachment of time that might take Michal away. In an odd way the sundial became a friendly indicator, marking the hours they shared together; his watch, ticking inexorably, reminded him that time was accelerated elsewhere by the landing of far-questing planes and the ringing of telephones in offices in Cairo. He tried not to think of that; instead he hoarded every moment of companionship, attentive even to the movement of her slim body when she walked slowly at his side. With a glance now he could read her face, and he felt exultant because she seemed to be content to be with him.

  Michal had quieted, often sleeping in the drowsy air of the heights. Waking, her eyes searched for Jacob instinctively.

  "For days," he teased her, "you haven't asked what this place is."

  She said gravely, "If there be a paradise on earth, this is it."

  You shouldn't, she argued, question paradise; it was there or it wasn't. And they could rest and not worry about it. One morning she investigated the dark water wheel that groaned as it revolved under the outlet of the lake. It turned a heavy millstone upon another stone to grind grain. "It's just a wheel," she announced after a long interval, "and it only moans because it is weary doing such excellent work making bread for us. It is not connected in the least with artillery."

  Not that Michal had expected any reverberation of guns to break the stillness of their mount. She was playing a game with herself, as a child might, smugly satisfied that she could sit unperturbed by this agonizing primitive water wheel which no longer held within it the dread of the storm-lashed wheel at Riyat. On the other hand, she still hated the sight of a fire, for which she was not prepared. It brought back the memory of the burning of the hospital train in Greece.

  "I was frightened that first night when we went up to our own altar fire," she confessed. "But you were there." And, turning away to scrutinize the antics of the water, she added, "That's not exactly true. You frightened me more—as if I were a seventeen-year-old. You still do at times."

  Confession was good, wasn't it, she mused aloud. It freed you from the dread you hugged close to yourself, and if you talked about fears they lost something of their reality. Or did they? Michal was not at all smug now, and her eyes distended as they watched the rushing water. "I go all to pieces mentally—and I can't reason about why that is. It's not the effect of shock alone after all these five years, Jacob."

  Twenty years before, a child alone and spoiled, she had been surrounded by family portraits of high commanding officers and statesmen and their ladies. She had learned too easily in school, and had fancied herself too easily in love. She had been married in a breathless moment, and had freed herself by divorce, to be sent abroad, wandering with a fond and scholarly grandfather who served the Foreign Office of His Britannic Majesty's government. When this Michal Thorne had thrown herself into study at the Sorbonne she had won a prize; she had been a favorite of the diplomatic corps until, at drowsy Athens, she had been caught in the maelstrom of the German invasion.

  Her fingers played with the pearls of her necklace as if they had been the parts of a rosary, and her eyes went far away. "Miss Michal Thorne had been agreeable and protected and quite in love with herself—in a protected garden. When the reality of terror came, after Athens, everything became confused. She felt that she belonged to Arthur—who was a British flier. Afterward, in Cairo, he hurt me, not only physically but in the things he did. He had a way of calling waiters and watching other handsome women when he thought I didn't notice. I was only a body to him, and a foolish, sentimental personality. I had been sentimental about him. I felt lost, and outside myself." Michal tried to smile. "Like a little barnyard fowl that
bruised itself when it tried to fly up, after the wild geese that swept by following the wind. I was hurt and grieved, all by my own doing, until. . .Jacob, in Mr. Parabat's garden I knew we were going to love one another."

  Gravely she nodded. "There, I've confessed." And, after a moment, "The only thing hurt in Cairo, was the disembodied part of me—what answers for my mind. And that is still afraid. It's the part outside of me that's afraid, and I sometimes think in the early hours of the morning there isn't a me any more."

  "There certainly is."

  "I am here and in Cairo too. And I'm not twins."

  "There's only one of you, and that one's here."

  "Do you think so?" Michal looked relieved.

  "But you'll miss Cairo," he said, "after a while."

  Michal grimaced reflectively. "Shall I? I worked too hard there after V-E Day, being ornamental to society. Having no more money of my own, I circulated gaily. I made bright conversation and danced with old friends and acquaintances, and bartered pretty French songs for my bed and board—although nothing was said about any barter. I just sang, like a minstrel of old time, Jacob. No, that's quite wrong. The minstrels did something fine for their people, and I only amused mine. But what else could I do? And now what can I do? I can't even warp the woof or weft or whatever it is of silk, like these village women. No, don't say anything, Jacob. I'm facing the fact that I'm a useless thing, outside my background. I can't even soothe your mind, tired in the evening by speculation about Araman."

  "You can."

  "But not with music. Jacob, I can make no music without a piano. I'm not even as practical as an aeolian harp."

  No, he thought, you are not practical in using people and things around you to help yourself; you have been bruised and hurt, and still out of your joyousness, content with small things, you have made this place a sanctuary, and it is precious because you feel it cannot last.