A Garden to the Eastward

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by Harold Lamb


  "How do you account for your Michelangelo?"

  This individual, a shy man scrupulously clad in silk, worked with his grandson, scraping the clay wall of a house with a bronze razor and rubbing it down with an oiled sheepskin. He prepared colors by pounding up blue crystals and red clay and ochre on a schist slab, moistening them and mixing them until he had the desired effect. Yet he painted nothing on the wall. After watching him, she had christened him Michelangelo.

  "He's waiting for inspiration. Perhaps he thinks it's better to do one painting that just suits him than one to please every customer. Aren't our own wall paintings something extra special, Jacob?"

  Michal grimaced at him carelessly. In these last weeks the sun had tinted her skin, and the shadows had gone from under her eyes. She slept, she said, like a cow in pasture. And she talked already of the snow that would come with winter—as if they could stay on in their new home. Jacob knew that she felt superstitious about opening Sir Clement's notes. "There's nothing we can do about them now, Jacob, is there? Is there?" she asked insistently.

  Nor did she want to break into the one door in Araman. It was a stout wooden door across the plaza from their house, and it bore a heavy modern padlock. Jacob had never seen it open.

  The house next this locked door showed traces of occupancy by a European—a pile of gray blankets covered with dust and a litter of candle stubs and empty bottles. What interested Jacob more was an accumulation of valuables strewn against the far end of the room. Here some fine Fergana and Tabriz carpets lay mixed with some choice specimens of ancient bronze like his own and a bolt of raw silk that Michal said was almost priceless nowadays. In an open bronze casket lay polished turquoises, carnelians, and even flawed rubies with bits of silver and a few curios.

  All these might have come from the region around Araman or the bazaars in Kurdish villages like Riyat. Yet they had been selected for their intrinsic value—that is as merchandise that would bring high prices in European markets. Except for the carpets, they had no use in Araman. A European, Jacob thought, must have gathered this trove together, probably with the idea of taking it out someday.

  Oddly enough the owner of the trove and the blankets—if he still existed—had not attempted to lock up his valuables, although the door of the next dwelling was securely locked. Apparently he had no fear that any of it would be stolen.

  Unexpectedly, Michal took a fancy to one object in the chest. This was a small silver medallion within which the head of a saint had been painted, unmistakably Russian work.

  "It's Nikolka," she cried. "Saint Nicholas you would call him, Jacob. He protects you from evil spirits. I need him."

  This small ikon she hung by their bed, by the lampstand, saying that no home was complete without its household gods, and she would borrow Nikolka at least until an owner appeared to claim him. Across from the ikon she arranged Jacob's winged horse in a niche, saying that he also must have tutelary powers since he had brought Jacob to her. Admiring the effect, she said, "Now our two guardians should be able to protect us properly."

  "You're reverting to your ancestors," he assured her. "The Scots and Finns had a touch of it—of being fey."

  "I'm not seeing any fetches. It's simply that I feel comfortable and protected with my household gods."

  "Protected against what?"

  Michal's eyes turned dark and her supple lips drooped. "I don't know, Jacob."

  What was there to fear on their mountain? Sir Clement had conjectured that there might be an unidentified power concealed on it. The sequence of events that had brought Jacob hither had been in no way inexplicable; the mount itself, although unusual, had been shaped by natural forces. The people themselves merely seemed odd because they had cut themselves off voluntarily from the outer world. This remnant of a mountain tribe kept up some of its customs here. The everlasting fire was ritual, or—suppose it was not? Flame by night and smoke by day had been the most ancient signals of human beings. Suppose the Watchman and his folk signaled from the mount?—But to whom? Cogitate as he would, Jacob could discern nothing but natural life upon Araman.

  "We could open Sir Clement's notes," he ventured.

  Defiantly, Michal shook her head. "Please—let's not."

  The change came with the winds of the equinox.

  One evening Jacob saw the Watchman adjusting the globe of the sky. Examining it, he found that the sphere was set to show the star Fomalhaut just at the horizon's rim. That would be the night sky of the autumn equinox, when Fomalhaut was in line with the side of Pegasus's Square and the North Star. After that night the days would be shorter than the nights.

  Winds buffeted the summit. Cloud banks pressed against the encircling peaks. In the village, children appeared with kites. Since strands of copper and gut were attached to the kites, a faint harmony sounded when they rose on the wind.

  Swarming like bees up and down the slope, laughing and sweating, the villagers labored to get in the last of the harvest before the storms should come. While men still winnowed the dry wheat below—tossing it into the wind—the women and children lugged up panniers of wheat, barley, and grapes. Badr, who had been occupied with the horses in the valley, joined in salvaging their winter's food from the earth.

  Michal flitted about, intrigued. "Jacob, I think we are going to have a party," she volunteered after the last loads were in. "There's a deal of washing and cooking going on—the children are guzzling grapes, the kites are tuning up beautifully, the girls are getting out white Greeklike things. I know we're invited."

  "And I suppose," Jacob teased, "you haven't a thing to wear."

  Michal thought she would wear a plain white sport dress with a scarlet scarf. Jacob noticed that the older women all had a touch of scarlet on them. It was a Zoroastrian touch, this hue of blood upon the white of purity. Down by the lake he came upon a dozen wine jars, all bearing a familiar mark stamped upon their handles, a miniature horseman, the Saint George of the monastery. Near the wine jars he sighted the familiar black-robed figure of Father Hyacinth. The priest gave no explanation of his appearance, except to say that he had brought wine for the festival. "Vin du pays," he smiled, indicating the jars. He was sorting out and packing bundles of dried roses, jasmine, and poppies. Evidently he took these in exchange for the wine of the monastery. And in turn they would be sent to M. Parabat, for money. Eventually small vials of perfume would appear in the shops of the Kasr de Nil in Cairo, or in Calcutta, to be bought by women who had a wealth of money to spend.

  "It is the commerce," Father Hyacinth remarked, smiling. When Jacob questioned him eagerly to discover if he had seen or heard anything of Daoud, the priest admitted that he had found Daoud the month before within sight of the valley of Araman. Instead of going on with him, the young Kurd had turned back abruptly, asking if there was a trail leading to Riyat. Father Hyacinth did not know why Daoud had turned back, except that he had said he would return.

  "You think," Jacob asked him, "that we will be allowed to stay?"

  Father Hyacinth wasted no thought upon the matter. "Stay, certainly, if you wish." He blinked mildly at Michal. "Or, if you wish to go, the way is still open."

  "You mean," Michal asked quickly in her fluent French, "that the road may be closed by snow?"

  "By snow, yes, that is true. But the arrival of others may occur."

  "What others, Father Hyacinth?"

  That he did not know, except that, as Mar Shimun had pointed out, foreigners were beginning to discover the way to Araman and the monastery. Michal pondered the possibilities of being snowed in for a winter.

  That evening they saw the death of the summer. The sun, at setting, dipped beneath the dark cloud strata and for a few moments shone upward upon the mount. Wraiths of vapor twisted around the peaks as if unseen hands were waving veils.

  Every soul came from the village to the altar height. The Watchman came and took his stand with his people. He raised his arms and their arms rose. Rigid they stood and silent, even the children
, facing the fading sun. From their throats came a deep lament, with the women's voices rising over the men's.

  This chant had the undertone of mourning, the peal of joy. It was no merry harvest song but the ojdest of all hymns. It mourned for the death of summer and of light, for Tammuz and that young god whose death must come before the birth of seed and light in the spring.

  When the villagers had left the height with the imperturbable Father Hyacinth, Michal and Jacob sat by the altar to be alone.

  "I feel as if I had been to church," Michal said suddenly, surprised.

  Jacob nodded. "Yes."

  That sensation was important to her, although she made light of it. "Feel better?" he asked.

  "Don't you?"

  It was hard to put into words, Jacob found. There was the feeling of peace, and of having touched for a moment something intangible which did not change, but which changed you. It was the sensation of reaching out toward the unknowable.

  "It's probably just us thinking the same thing," he added.

  "No, I still think it's like a church."

  "Perhaps we've merely learned to say what we really feel, and to be honest about it."

  Michal's lips were touched by a smile. "There's no point in being anything else here, is there? Not now, with us."

  "Outside, it would be hard to do it. It means a great deal." Jacob wondered why he said that. Without Michal, it would not have been important.

  "You were always honest, Jacob. Yet you never trusted yourself, and you went away from people." Her head resting on her slim arms, she looked up through half-closed eyes, as if in his face she found the focus of her thoughts. "You don't change easily, and I'm glad of that. I'm glad"—she smiled—"to be so nicely adjusted to my environment."

  "Here?"

  "In you, darling. You don't know it, but you protect me because anything harmful would have to come through you to touch me. No, you do know that, and you want it. But all my simple pleasures also come through you."

  There was something unknowable in her, and something he could never touch. "I'm not much of a protection. I'm always afraid that the gardens and the parties of Cairo are going to reach out and spirit you away to a dance somewhere. That sounds idiotic, but I dream about it."

  "Do you? Is that when you mutter so in your sleep? Not even in a dream would I go a-hunting with generals to kill a poor desert gazelle—or recline by a pool listening to Mrs. General discuss the best insecticide." Her eyes closed and her voice changed. "That Michal Thorne is only a ghost now, a poor ghostling hovering over the bright lights with a polite Cheshire-cat smile. This is the real me, here. Only I don't know myself very well as yet."

  Her head turned away from him. "I'm afraid of the unknowable in you too. I think we were meant to be here, but you do not. You have something in you that never listens to me. It made you feel the war was not over in Cairo, when everybody else in uniform was celebrating; it made you follow a bronze horse to Riyat and help a dreaming old man by coming here. It may make you fight for the Kurds, who are helpless children just like us. And someday it may hurt me very much."

  After her moment of brooding, Michal threw herself wholeheartedly into the rejoicing of the feast that followed the singing of the hymn. Like hungry children the people of the mount gorged themselves with the flesh of young sheep, sacrificed from the small pasture herd. They soaked themselves with the red wine of the monastery, sipping it from clay bowls that Michal had not seen brought out before. They had anointed themselves with a fragrant oil, and they carried about small bay branches with the leaves still on them.

  Bowls of goat's milk were passed around with the wine by the younger girls, and trays of grapes and nuts. Even Michelangelo and his grave grandson tasted solemnly of each dish. Then they all joined hands and danced along the edge of the lake which reflected their shadows. It was more hand-holding than dancing, since the human chain merely moved happily about the water's edge, lifting their clasped hands with the green branches. To Jacob it appeared that they were all carrying out some remembered ritual, clumsily, as stage hands might enact a scene after the actors had departed from the stage.

  "It is the fete of the autumn," Father Hyacinth observed. "In the spring will arrive the other fete of the planting of the seed."

  It was noisy enough, because some of the girls played with castanets, and one pushed Badr into the lake and ran away when he emerged laughing.

  "Now the party is a success," Jacob decided.

  "I'm more intoxicated than I seem," Michal informed him. "With so much unaccustomed meat and wine and all, I feel slightly maenadic too. I'm glad I'm not too old for that."

  "It's very becoming."

  "It's good for my inhibitions."

  She was diligently trying to work the castanets. Missing the Watchman in the crowd, Jacob went up to the fire altar. His head hummed, and he felt like talking. Such a simple thing as a language ought not to prevent him talking with the caretaker of the mount. To his surprise he found that the older man had bound a piece of sheer floss silk around his mouth and throat, to prevent his breath from coming near the fire. Under matted brows his blue eyes peered at Jacob,, gravely questioning. He pointed toward the west.

  In the dark line of the western ridge a speck of flame showed.

  It seemed to be a fire, and for a moment Jacob wondered if human beings on another summit were celebrating the harvest night. Whatever the source of the flame might be, it did not disturb the Watchman.

  Presently the old man went over to the cliff. Taking up a bronze hammer and wedge, he began to cut without haste a new symbol on the line of those he had made already. It looked like a miniature tree and Jacob could make nothing of it.

  Probably the Watchman was merely chalking up the night of the equinox, which this was. He had to keep a tally of the days somehow. Or did he? "To hell with speculation," Jacob remarked while the Watchman took no heed. "If I could break your code of language, I might know something. And if so, what? I'm happy enough as it is, old-timer."

  No locked door would he unlock, no cliff writing would he decipher, no signal fire would he conjure into meaning. As Michal wished, he would let well enough alone.

  "I'll no question make of ayes or noes," he added cheerfully, "but I'll be one with yesterday's seven thousand years. That's the opinion of a very wise man, a drunken astronomer, Omar Khayyam."

  In the Watchman's veined hands the wedge and the hammer tapped patiently at the rock. By Jacob's watch it was midnight. He made his way back to his house.

  Under the lamp Michal was rummaging in a saddlebag.

  "I've had a good, one-way talk with the Watchman," Jacob assured her. "And we decided not to question our fate."

  "I'm glad of that, Jacob. I've had a chat just like yours with Badr. I think the cold bath sobered him. He mentioned Sir Clement Bigsby and something about coming or going. I don't know which. Since poor Sir Clement can't be coming to us, Badr probably thought it was time we went back to him. But that's just what we are not doing." When she felt his arm around her and heard his laugh, she turned her face up to him instinctively. "I found Sir Clement's sealed orders in your bag, my dear man, and straightway I wanted to burn them. Shall we?"

  "Lord, no." For a second Jacob was bothered. Those pages written by the sick man must be valuable to him. They could hardly tell anything important about this place called Araman, which the orientalist had never seen. "Michal, we ought to read those pages. Then perhaps we can send Badr back—if you can get the idea over to him—with a message."

  From the circle of his arm she surveyed her household gods. "All right. I feel very bold tonight. We're both intoxicated. And I'm glad I didn't burn the dispatches, because you would never have forgiven me."

  Going to the lamp, Jacob opened the sealed envelope and took out some pages covered with the Englishman's minute writing. In some surprise he said, "It's a chapter called 'The Wanderers.'"

  "I have written much for learned societies [he read aloud to Michal] a
nd perhaps at last I may be permitted to make a conjecture. I have been working alone in meditation by the headwaters of the Greater Zab River, and I am impelled to write this because it now appears that we have been standing near the presence of a truth which we have not recognized. This must be my excuse for voicing a conjecture which may of course be no more than the wishful thinking of a tired mind."

  "Poor Sir Clement," Michal murmured, "apologizing for speaking his mind."

  "The greatest mystery [Jacob read on] about ancient man has been the place of his origin. In what place did Homo sapiens, the first brilliant reasoning and inventive racial group, embark on its long progress upward from animallike existence? Needless to say, archaeologists have found signs of such an origin widely scattered throughout southwestern Asia. It would be better to say southern Eurasia. Those signs have been uncovered in the black-earth steppes of southern Russia, at Harappa in the Five River delta of India, in the valley of the Tigris, and scantily in the incense-producing coast of Arabia.

  "Narrowing this circle, however, ruins of a pre-Flood civilization have been found at Carchemish in the shadow of the Anatolian hills, at Ray near the edge of the Caspian inland sea, and down the Euphrates River at Ur, called of the Chaldees. These centers, existing in the fifth millennium before Christ, predate the rise of civilization in the valley of the Nile.

  "Within this narrower circle the mountain chains of Kurdistan form the center. Concerning this center we have reasoned often enough that it may have enjoyed a civilization unknown to us—one that would have been transmitted outward through such junctions (along the caravan routes) as Carchemish, Ur, or Ray.

  "Recent excavations along the Tigris and Euphrates have disclosed similarities in the earliest culture to that of the valley of the Indus. These similarities, as C. Leonard Wolley and others state, point to a common source somewhere—no one knows exactly where—between the Tigris and the Indus.

 

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