by Harold Lamb
Aloud, he said, "You're much too fond of staring at water rushing over a wheel, or at a fire. That's bad for your imagination."
"And are you good for it?" She smiled up at him.
From that hour Michal took to watching the village women at their tasks, observing how they heated water in caldrons over the bronze braziers, or baked bread in the clay ovens. She took to visiting the house of the woman who had served them that first night—a handsome person with wide, meditative eyes nearly as tall as Michal and perhaps forty years of age. Imanya, as Michal called her, seemed to live alone.
Once Jacob came on them fingering the embroidery that the other had skillfully applied to what looked like a homespun smock.
"Imanya did it all herself," Michal confided to him, "and it's better than I could ever manage to do."
"What else do you know about her?" Jacob asked, surprised. "She has a son about my age."
"In what language did she explain all that?"
"I don't know."
Michal looked confused. You didn't need much of a vocabulary, she vouchsafed, to discuss children and ages and such. Anyway, Imanya understood that much of Persian. Maudar was mother just as mater in Latin, and daukhtar seemed to be daughter.
"Any other link words?"
"Don't be technical, Jacob. When two women get together in a house, they can find something to talk about, especially if one is perfectly willing to do all the work and the other hates doing it. I won't tell you which is which."
This gave Jacob something to reflect upon. Words of a family's relationship, parents and children, words for primitive tools such as plows, and inescapable marvels of nature like the sun and stars tended to keep to their ancient origin. They remained the old words—unless a people learned another language. If these folk of the mount understood such Indo-Iranian words—which had come down through the changes in Latin, English, and German—it might mean they were originally of Aryan stock. Sanskrit and ancient Persian were of the same language stock. And possibly the growing things on the mount, the pines, wild roses, ivy, and oaks, had been brought with them in some early migration from a northern climate. Physically, these people appeared to be Aryan stock, with light eyes, slender bodies, and long heads. The darkness of their skin could come from long exposure to the sun.
"What does Imanya call the stars?" he wondered.
"Ask the Watchman, Captain Ide. Imanya has too much to attend to to bother about the stars."
The Watchman, as Michal had christened him, was the taciturn caretaker of the fire. By day, apparently, he slept. At evening he emerged to eat and drink heartily, and to maintain his vigil. In time, Jacob learned that he recognized the word astra as signifying stars.
He had names also for the constellations, because he pointed out the Dipper and Orion's Square, but Jacob could make nothing of his words. The old man did, however, assent to the name of Araman, which he seemed to apply to the valley as a whole.
Although he was distinguished from the others by living apart in one of the colonnaded dwellings set into the cliffs and fronting the plaza—the residences that Michal, who shared one, called the upper level—and by his attire—for his undergarment with the long Kurdish sleeves was the color of blood—the Watchman appeared to be more than any patriarch of his flock.
For one thing, Jacob had the impression that the Watchman waited at his post by the fire not merely because ritual might require it, but because he was waiting through the hours for some happening of which he alone had knowledge. And Jacob wondered if some others might not be absent from Araman.
The place certainly had been designed for more than its forty-odd inhabitants. How long ago it had been constructed, out of the stones of the summit, he had no means of telling. Like the cliff dwellings of Petra, Araman might have been built in remote antiquity and added to in Roman times. Yet he felt certain Romans had never been there.
His observation of the people themselves showed that the family groups kept close together, preparing their food at common ovens and hearths although sleeping apart. The women had features as delicate as those delineated on Greek vases, and their draped garment, bound at the waist, resembled the early Greek chlamys. With the children, they worked the light silk looms while the men did the heavier cloth weaving. These women were kept in no purdah. They went down with the men at times to cultivate the few fields and grapevines near the shrine. There a herd of black goats grazed, taking its share of the crops.
Another tribe of Kurds passing by left supplies and fruit at the shrine. This seemed to be customary in the valley, whether the tribesmen felt obliged to leave propitiatory gifts, or whether they took pains to supply the folk of Araman.
The children did their share of the work. The youngest had toys—animal shapes carved out of wood. And they did not intrude within the house of the foreigners, although they must have been curious about them.
After a while Jacob was sure that he and Michal were accepted simply as guests on the summit. They shared food equally with the others—chiefly the Sana meat gruel made out of mutton broth and scraps and pounded wheat. No subservience was paid them by the village folk, nor was anything asked of them.
"Some foreigners must have been here before," he told Michal.
"Then they did not disturb the village," she retorted. "I still think it's like Switzerland, only more peaceful. Why is that, Jacob?"
He had had the same thought. This sense of peace in Araman must come from the simplicity of the needs of the people, who gathered food and clothed themselves by the labor of their hands, and rested when they were tired. They might have no greater anxieties because they knew no other. That was not enough, however. This folk had a natural intelligence; if they had merely kept themselves alive for centuries in this fashion, they would have in-bred and decayed in mentality to the point of idiocy. They must have some preoccupation or some purpose to activate them. The quiet and the small comforts of Araman had become great to them because apart from these there existed some danger or determination that shaped their lives.
He was sure of this because an air of expectancy hung around the village. Often the people would go in groups to look from the ruined wall down the length of the valley. Michal admitted that ordinary peasants would never take such an interest in familiar scenery. "But these are not peasants," she added.
Jacob became morally certain that they watched for something outside the walls—something so important to them that the coming of the foreign pair had been no more than an interlude.
Would it be some specific danger? he wondered. If so, what danger could threaten this almost impregnable summit?
That they could endure death he discovered one day by accident. It was when they were carrying up the loads that Jacob saw a woman fall. A breeze was blowing fitfully, and as the climbers rounded a shoulder they strained against the rock's side. The woman stumbled, lost her footing, and rolled slowly down the shoulder. For three seconds she vanished. Then a black speck appeared below, thrown out from the mount's side, hurtling down.
The next day Jacob observed heavy smoke rising from the tree by the shrine, indicating that the body was being burned. He was glad that Michal had seen nothing of this. As it was, she refused emphatically to venture down from the summit. Doubting if he could make the descent himself without a rope, he did not want Michal to try it.
The two of them were immured on the summit of Araman.
Before two weeks had passed Jacob became convinced that, simple as the inhabitants of Araman might appear to be, they had developed an active intelligence. What puzzled him sorely was the nature of that intelligence.
Here was a remnant of people almost cut off from the outside world. Yet they had courtesy, and kindness, and some rudiments of scientific understanding. The latter was indicated by the symbols on the rock faces and by the bronze instruments standing on the height near the altar.
First he studied the symbols patiently. They had been cut in regular groups where the surface of the st
one was smooth. Many were almost obliterated by weathering; a few had been freshly made. Apparently, then, these symbols had been carved over a period of thousands of years.
With a little effort he picked out nine symbols repeated constantly in the inscriptions. Since there were nine, he suspected them to be numerals. Certainly they appeared more primitive than the Arabic and might well be much earlier in origin. He recalled that the first numerals had been formed out of signs made by the fingers of human hands long before the letters of a language had been shaped. By copying the nine symbols and juggling them around, he arranged a series that satisfied him.
Under these he copied the numerals of the Western world, developed from the Phoenician-Arabic. These two series corresponded roughly enough.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
The other markings on the rock occurred regularly among the numerals. Being so regular, they should be indications of time—such as the seasons, or events such as the reigns of kings succeeding each other, or possibly a combination of the two.
"It looks like a calendar, with some events mixed in, perhaps," he explained to Michal. "It's been kept up to date, if so, because some symbols have been cut in the last months."
"Why should our people want to keep a calendar?" she demanded instantly. "Does it make a difference to them if this is Anno Domini 1946, or last year or next?"
"Apparently it does. But you can be sure it's not A.D. 1946 to them—it's something else."
"I hope so, Jacob."
Her earnestness made him smile. Although she said little about it, Michal probed into the secrets of her village. And she avoided going near the bronze instruments, which seemed ominous to her.
When Jacob reflected that if the calendar were as ancient as its symbols it must have been started before 3000 b.c. he became thoughtful. By that reckoning, this would be the year 5000 or so. But of what?
It was Michal who discovered the invisible beast that had fled from them the first night. By the lake she happened on a young gazelle, grazing, that scampered away from her with just such a clatter as the unknown animal had made. Sensitive to sounds, she had been startled in her house by hearing the talk of villagers close beside her when she was alone and, investigating, she had found a hollow in the wall under the wind tower. Listening carefully at this opening, she had heard human beings moving about, benches scraping, and children crying—all the habitual sounds of the village street two hundred yards away.
The funnel in the wall seemed to curve and to narrow. By craning her head in, Michal could glimpse a crack of light far down the small tunnel which apparently ran through the rock itself to the area below.
"It's a whispering corridor," she told Jacob. "They had one in a Byzantine palace so the Empress could hear the patriarch praying, or the other way around. Perhaps someone who lived here once wanted to listen to the talk of the crowd. I hope it doesn't work both ways."
Michal was much more interested in making friends with the half-tame gazelle than in the whispering tunnel.
"We'll not need to worry about our public utilities here, Michal. The water power is trouble-proof; the lights will burn as long as the oil lasts; our house telephone leads to the street, and the entrance bell can be heard for thirty miles. I think our telegraph works about as far as that."
"I didn't know we had a telegraph." Michal looked alarmed.
"It's up in the observatory."
"Oh, that."
The platform they called the observatory stood exposed on the height near the fire altar. It had upon it three instruments, all cast in massive bronze. Unaccountably, Michal distrusted them. Jacob had found much to interest him in the instruments, and had spent many hours cleaning them with oil because they had been coated with dust and corrosion.
"Come and see it work," he said.
Michal followed him, silent and unwilling. The first instrument was a six-foot celestial globe, beautifully mounted on its bronze stand. Upon its surface the patterns of the principal constellations had been traced and the planets had been marked. Each bore a symbol unknown to Jacob, but there was no mistaking the familiar patterns which had been called by many names. Jacob had turned it to show uppermost the night sky of early autumn, and he thought the great sphere had been made for this latitude. Evidently it had not been used for many months.
The second instrument, hanging from a movable bar, seemed to be a simple astrolabe with the position of the bright stars showing on the points of its spiderlike frame. By sighting the astrolabe's pointer at stars or mountain peaks, their height above the horizon could be estimated, and astronomical time, fairly well.
"If these people could do it, that is," he added hastily. "Someone could, once, because these instruments are made carefully, for use."
"Jacob, why do you want to find out what they can estimate? We've found a lovely mountaintop, and you call it a truncated cone and want to know how high it is to a foot."
"It's about eleven thousand feet."
Michal looked at him.
"There's one odd thing about these instruments," he went on eagerly. "They all work by the sky—by the sun or stars—or deal with the heights nearest the sky."
"Then there's no telegraph after all, and you were teasing me."
Jacob nodded at the remaining apparatus—a round two-foot metal plate mounted like a searchlight, pivoted on a ring, so—like the astrolabe—it could be swung in any direction. Even with a scanty polishing this bronze plate reflected the sun's rays.
Stepping in front of it, Michal surveyed herself in it without approval. "It's not a very good mirror, is it?" she hazarded.
"Watch."
Swinging the handle of the plate, Jacob directed a shaft of light outward and upward, reflected from the slightly concave surface.
Michal cried sharply, "Don't do that! Stop!"
Without heeding her, he swung the plate down. Over a distant ridge, deep in shadow, a point of light moved downward. "Telegram by sun power," he explained triumphantly, "from the Mount to Beyond—ten miles in a tenth of a second."
"Jacob! Please let it alone."
Reluctantly, he released the plate. What bothered him was that the age of these primitive scientific instruments could not be conjectured. The hard bronze had withstood the erosion of weather.
When he looked around, Michal was over at the altar, putting wood on the fire as she had seen the village women do. Her head, tinged gold by the sun, was lifted defiantly. The wind pressed her light muslin dress back against her body. Behind her, immobile and lifeless, the summits of the mountains stretched to the horizon.
When Jacob came to her side, he saw that her eyes were wet with tears not of the wind's making. "It's so lovely, and I love it so." She was speaking in a monotone, as if to herself, yet aware that Jacob heard her. "There's nothing strange here; only we are strange. If we could see. . .Jacob, look back at the lake through tears—no, just squint your eyes, and you will see how very different it is without any of the contrivances you dote upon."
Obeying, he turned and looked down through half-closed eyes. The effect was startling. The steps from the altar height, the grass-grown plaza now appeared to be a natural amphitheater. The sculptures hewn into the rock merged into the surface of the stone. Below, the small buildings stood like boulders in the green of a garden falling to the verdure of the lake. Wild geese flying away overhead seemed to be leaving a paradise of the earth.
Jacob thought: whoever designed this knew the beauty of natural things and he designed nothing that did not belong here.
"It is beautiful," he said, and found Michal gone. When he called her she did not answer, although she must have heard. What had hurt her he did not know; she had a way of going off alone when the mood was on her.
Uneasy after an hour, he went down to their house. Michal had been there, because the wind was sounding its musical scale in the tower. That morning he had stopped the air inlet to the harp and Michal must have removed it since. Looking into the bed recess, he found tha
t some of her favorite dresses were gone from the bar where she had hung them.
Anxiously, he searched through her favorite places for the missing woman, thinking that she must be lonely or homesick in this mountain prison where there was nothing to do.
She was not with the gazelle which he found feeding among the water lilies, nor did he sight her dress in their sitting places along the wall; there was no sign of her on the steps outside.
Then he heard women shrieking with laughter not far away. Going toward the sound, he found himself on the path that led to the lakeside where flat boulders and a stretch of sand provided the villagers with their public laundry.
Here a dozen women and girls were rinsing out clothes, laying them to dry on the stones, convulsed with mirth. They watched Michal who, with skirt tucked up around her hips and bare white arms, was trying to gather assorted garments into a bundle, laughing helplessly. Water dripped from her hair and shoulders.
"Jacob," she cried, seeing him, "I can't carry it on my head the way they do. I—I haven't been educated that way, and it comes all to pieces."
Relief flooded through him. Michal, struggling with her wash, was wiping away tears of mirth, the moodiness of a few hours before completely forgotten. Carefully she balanced the bundle of wash on her disordered head and rose unsteadily to tread gingerly in her bare feet.
"I couldn't have you going around in soiled shirts," she explained, watching her burden, "when Imanya keeps everything so clean." The ache was still in Jacob, and he felt weak at the sight of her. "This isn't very much like your beach at Cannes," he said ruefully.
"I don't want it to be," she answered decisively. "I couldn't live so well at Cannes. Henceforth this day of the week shall be my washday while you are solving the symbols of the stars."
And Jacob marveled in silence at a woman's mind.
"It does hang together, and it does make sense," Michal insisted hotly when he mentioned the riddles of Araman. "For a newspaperman and a military mind like yours it doesn't because it's unfamiliar."