A Garden to the Eastward

by Harold Lamb

  When the two of them reached the lion gate, the three newcomers were close enough to be recognized by the naked eye. Jacob could almost feel the sudden tension in the German.

  First came Badr carrying a heavy pack; Daoud Khalid, burdened in similar fashion, was last. Between them, and roped to them, Clement Bigsby hauled himself up laboriously.

  As the Englishman reached the last steps he seemed to gather himself together and came on steadily. When he sighted them, he waved and called faintly, "Hullo. . .Captain Ide. Is Michele here?"

  Stepping out on the top, he fought to get his breath, holding to Badr's shoulder, his eyes on the German. "Not too easy a climb. Colonel Rudolf Vasstan?"

  The German nodded. "General Sir Clement Bigsbv, M.C., F.R.G.S.?"

  Sir Clement smiled. "Congratulations on being first in. I was delayed, you know, by illness."

  "You are better, so?"

  "Quite. I have some hope of persuading you to return with me to Baghdad."

  Glancing past the Englishman, Vasstan stood rigid, considering.

  "Your Assyrian chaps sighted me down the valley, Colonel Vasstan. Thought they had advised you I was on the way up."

  "I regret they failed to do so." A strange contortion moved the German's head, and his close-set eyes blinked. He seemed embarrassed, almost shy. "So! It is like the pass in the Altai. You remember the yamen in Lanchow-fu twenty-eight years ago? It is like that."

  Eagerness touched his voice; he was savoring their quest of other years. Now that his enemy was here, his own prestige had increased by the measure of the other's effort in seeking him.

  "Of course," Sir Clement acknowledged, as Daoud loosened the rope around him. Already his eyes were traveling eagerly over the stonework of the ruined wall.

  Jacob gripped Daoud's hand and took Bigsby's arm. The Englishman's thin face was dark with congested blood and his arm trembled with fatigue. "I'm going to put you between blankets," Jacob said. "This wall and the other stuff will be here tomorrow."

  That night hail and then snow came out of the north, enveloping the mount.

  On the morrow the wall was there but not as before. Ice coated its outer side; snow banked up against its rubble. The steps leading down to the valley were impassable until the ice sheathing melted.

  Winter had set in.

  For weeks, while ice rimmed the lake and the sun sank lower behind clouds in the southern sky, Clement Bigsby kept to his bed. Or, rather, he was kept in bed by Michal, who had assumed the duties of a nurse immediately she had seen him.

  Although he finished the journey to the valley on his feet, he was very weak, and Michal announced at once that he had a temperature. This fever hung on, never high but never ceasing, and in spite of his protests he had to content himself with a glimpse of Araman from the portico, until the weather cleared. "It's older in design than Petra," he assured Jacob with boyish enthusiasm. "Romans never built this wall; there's not a touch of the West about it. And you're quite justified in supposing that hundreds may have inhabited it once. The shrine, or fire altar, would appear older than the village. What a story it could tell, my boy!"

  Michal made him occupy the big bed with the mattress she had contrived for herself, while she and Jacob slept on quilts beyond the fire brazier. Borrowing cooking utensils from Imanya, she boiled goat's milk and brewed lentil soup and sana for her patient. "I'll do no more fluttering around you," she informed him. "I've always wanted to tell off a general, and now I'm going to keep you well in spite of your best efforts."

  "I do wish you'd drop the Sir Clement and this business of rank, Michele. It doesn't signify anything now, you know."

  "Very good, Clement darling." She smiled as if delighted. "It's your precious self that signifies, and in bed you stay until your tertiary fever is cured."

  It wasn't tertiary fever, she knew. Nor was it malaria. Knowing little of such sickness, listening to his laborious, unguarded breathing at night, Michal feared incipient pneumonia or cardial weakness.

  It troubled her, too, when he took her hand once and pulled her head down to look close into her eyes. Scanning the soft brown skin, the clean line of the unrouged lips, and the clear eyes, he whispered, "Good lad, Michele. You're fit as bedamned. Have you lost the dark fetches that came by you?"

  "I left them along the way," she explained proudly. "I think at Riyat, with Michal Thorne."

  "Then you should never go back to Riyat," he said gravely, kissing her hand. "In any case, the place has been pretty well shelled."

  Much as she delighted in the old scholar's approval, Michal was worried by an undertone in his words that sounded as if he were in some way taking farewell of her. While her spirit had healed of its scars in the mountains, his strength had failed perceptibly.

  When the other foreigners came in, Sir Clement roused himself to jest with them. Now in the long evenings a circle formed around the invalid's bed; Colonel Matejko brought his chessboard unobtrusively and soon discovered that the Englishman was his master at the game.

  Vasstan appeared at first with brandy and cognac; then he came to talk endlessly about the saga he had shared with the British, when he had been hounded—by the English leash hounds, he said, the Gurkhas, Sikhs, and Pathans of northern India who had taken the English King's pay to hunt him over the roof of the world. "They were all volunteers," Clement murmured, "good fellows."

  In this fashion each night the two arch-enemies retraced their course over the mighty mountains of central Asia, recalling the bygone day when war had retained a vestige of a game, the matchless game of life against life played by Briton and Teuton.

  Jacob noticed that Daoud kept away from these gatherings. For some reason the young archaeologist had lost his assurance. Although he spent long hours copying the carvings in the cliff and listening to the talk of Michelangelo, he took to wandering along the wall, brooding like the Pole. The only explanation he gave to Jacob of his disappearance two months before was that he had sighted the solitary mount of Araman in the valley, but had lost his way completely until he reached the river lower down and followed it to Riyat, where Sir Clement had insisted upon attempting the ascent with him, once convinced that Araman could be reached.

  Sir Clement had more to say.

  "I'm sorry, Jacob—sorry to tell you he's lying, at least in part. He told me he came down over the passes with only one night's sleep. Imagine that! You nor I could not have done it. Something frightened Daoud, or he funked making the final ascent alone and ran for it. I wish I knew what turned him back; but it's one of the things that in all likelihood he will never explain."

  And he added thoughtfully:

  "It must have been something rather intangible, because he feels no concern about us. Those chaps have tremendous physical endurance, yet they go all to pieces mentally without warning—or at least they revert to a different state of mind. In a moment, for no apparent reason, they feel a soul sickness that drives them out into deserts or blinding heat, to feel rocks under their feet and the emptiness of the sky above them. It's like a fever that drives them away from the city pavements into solitude. Sometimes whole tribes or peoples catch this fever of unrest and snatch up a banner to go to war, to kill and be killed. Or they follow a new leader upon a trek to a new land. That's the Islam in them. It's more than nomadic restlessness—it's really fear that they may be losing their faith, and they turn blindly into the desert to restore it."

  Deep anxiety sharpened the orientalist's words.

  "The people around here aren't Moslems," Jacob pointed out.

  "Still, they are afflicted by the fever. It's spreading from east to west, from the folk of poor, struggling India to the Turkish highlanders. Even the Afghans in their hills are watching for signs of disaster."

  Only when they were alone and the wall vent stopped up did the tired Englishman speak so frankly to the American of the increasing anxiety that had driven him to the ascent of Araman. Between the two a father-and-son relationship had come into being, and Jacob
suspected that the retired soldier was trying at every opportunity to give him all the information he possessed.

  "These men of the East are moved by signs and portents that you and I do not sense or believe in. And they do not explain such matters to us. If we knew what the sign was, we would be better able to deal with it. Of course, after this last war, they have lost trust in foreigners—in most of us British and even in you Americans, because you have broken wartime promises to them. If they would only stay quiet for a year!"

  His words were like a cry of agony.

  "How can you keep hundreds of millions quiet in their homes, when something has stirred them up to fear calamity?" "Something they don't understand?" Jacob asked quickly.

  "Of course they don't understand it. It is coming from outside the routine of their lives."

  "From the west?"

  "Not from our west, certainly. The chaps around here, the Herki and Baradust Kurds, have gone wild for independence. Somebody has stirred them up to that and has armed them into the bargain."

  Unquestionably, Sir Clement added, agents of the Soviet Union had been at work along these frontiers. They had kept out of official sight, and had worked quietly to undermine the weak oriental governments by fragmenting all authority. By setting up new states beyond the frontiers, the control of the Kremlin could be extended and the Russian frontiers advanced in that manner toward the southern seas. "Each independent state taken under Soviet protection is another step outward, and those Russians have long legs." Sir Clement paused, with a wan smile. "We British have meddled in our time with the governments east of Suez, as you know, Jacob. But now we're very tired; we have our backs to the sea in Asia, and we hope for no more than to teach the Asiatics to manage their own affairs." He lay back with a sigh to sip a little cognac. "It's late in the day for that, I admit. Curious that the name of Moscow, the old name Moskva, should mean troubled waters."

  Thinking of Riyat and the Mullah Ismail, Jacob said nothing. By degrees Sir Clement informed him of the convolutions of the outer world during the five months that he and Michal had been beyond reach of newspapers and cabled news bulletins and even gossip—of the fruitless conferences of the foreign ministers of the great powers in New York, London, and Paris; of the disputes over Iran and Turkey that had checkmated the efforts of the Security Council of the United Nations to make progress toward peaceful adjustment of the wartime dislocation. To Jacob this news from the outside seemed bodiless, less real than the storm gusts that swept the wall of Araman.

  "The trouble over control of the port of Trieste and the elections in Greece, within the Mediterranean, were bad enough," he pointed out. "As bad as the torturing of the carcase of Manchukuo. But I feel that the key to the trouble is here."

  "Hardly in this valley," Jacob objected.

  "In this valley, and even perhaps within Araman itself."

  Here, Sir Clement insisted, they were on the line of the invisible frontier that stretched from the water gate of the Dardanelles in the west to the mountain passes above India in the east. This was the vital frontier.

  The peoples bordering it—Turks, Iraqis, Iranians, Afghans, the multitudes of northern India—had escaped involvement in the last war. Yet they were becoming involved now in a new species of conflict, something they did not understand.

  Along this frontier lay the great oil fields, from Baku to Kirkuk, Masjid-i-Sulaiman, and the Saudi Arabian refinery of the Americans. From it stretched communications to the sea, the Persian Gulf, as well as the Mediterranean. And within it waited sites for strategic airfields from which bombers could be over the seaports or oil refineries in a few minutes' time. These mountains contained mineral deposits now worth more than gold itself to the great powers outside.

  "It's a veritable storehouse of the stuff of a future war," Sir Clement sighed, "and control of this Nearer East means control of Asia—for the Far East is exhausted, at least during these few years, by the Japanese war."

  The heart of this frontier lay within the mountains of Kurdistan; Kurdish tribes roamed within sight of the Black Sea and the distant massifs of Afghanistan.

  "These mountains have always been at peace, Jacob. Now conflict is breaking out within them and spreading like a pestilence. If it spreads, foreign powers will intervene. The situation here is worse than in eastern Europe in thirty-nine or forty-one. It's about as bad as could be. British Intelligence is definite on that point, as I happen to know."

  "How great do you think the danger is?" Jacob asked, confident that the Englishman would not exaggerate.

  Bigsby glanced at the ikon of Saint Nikolka. After a moment he said, "Peace itself is at stake."

  As if in a dream, Jacob cast his thought out from the mist of the summit toward that outer world wherein great sprawling cities and intertwined arteries of communication, the fabric of a wounded civilization, waited, lighted and pulsing with mechanical power, fine-spun in laboratories—waited for what might come out of these recesses of Asia.

  "The snow will cut off most of the mountain region," Sir Clement went on quietly. "And this truce of winter will last a month or so. If I had the strength to get about for only two months, to talk to Mullah Ismail and the tribal leaders at Sanjbulak—I'd give the rest of my time on earth for that."

  In his words rang the determination of a soldier who, once his objective had been made clear, would sacrifice everything to gain it.

  They did not speak of their fears to Daoud, who was finishing copying the inscriptions along the rock face. Readily the archaeologist agreed with Jacob that the figures represented the numerals from one to nine, with a sign added for zero.

  That they had been utilized to keep a calendar of stellar time, he judged from the fact that other symbols were astronomical. "They are at least as ancient as the Nana Ghat inscriptions of India. You saw how plain lines were used for one, two, and three. Yes, they reveal similarities to the Indian system and other similarities to the earliest Sumerian or Arabic. That is important. Do you know why?"

  Jacob grinned. "Yes. Because this place lies on the earth between those Indian mountains and your valley of the Tigris, that used to be Sumerian or Arabic."

  "And because there are elements of both the others here. That means this system may well have been the oldest of the three. Like this."

  Rapidly the archaeologist traced some letters.

  AB BC CD

  "That is too simple, of course. But if we find a B in the first of two pairs and a C in the second pairs, we can be pretty certain the middle combination was the original of the others." Thoughtfully he nodded. "Our rock calendar seems to have been kept up for three millenniums."

  His patient watching of the people had shown Daoud that the children still used the fingers of their right hand to make the signs for numbers in their games. From such finger signs the numerals on the cliff had been formed in a very remote time.

  Working with the numbers and names for members of a family and for the oldest elements of life—water, fire, earth, and the sun—Daoud was beginning to identify some spoken words; instead of trying to talk connectedly with the people of Araman he listened patiently as they worked indoors during the storms, milking goats, adding strands to the cloth on the hand looms. Especially when the women chanted over their work, he listened for recognizable sounds and copied them down—as a musician might make notes of some unfamiliar orchestration.

  "They are speaking a dead language without any doubt," he informed Sir Clement. "And very clearly too. It has affinities with ancient Greek and with Sanskrit. Their hymns are very close to the Hindu Gathas."

  Daoud went at this task without trying to theorize but identifying words before comparing them with other languages. In Araman, seven was hapta, as in Greek, in Sanskrit sapta, and in modern Persian haft. The elders or fathers of Araman were pittara, as in the Gathas, in contrast to the Latin pater and Persian pedar. Neither Daoud nor Sir Clement doubted that they were dealing with an Indo-European or Aryan language from the first. Beco
ming more cheerful as he worked, Daoud laughed, remarking that this was the only dead language that had survived in speaking instead of writing—in fact, it was still alive!

  To him the whole summit was no more than an undreamed-of laboratory of the remote past, where ghosts, as it were, had come to life. Only at night and in spells of brooding did he come under the shadow of intangible dread. And of that he spoke to Jacob only once. "It's like opening a tomb, Jacob. Even a hardened archaeologist going into such a place for the first time feels awe because the things around him had not been disturbed for centuries before him. Perhaps such tombs were protected in some way against human intrusion."

  He said no more than that. But Jacob reflected that Daoud had gone away from Araman at the first sight of it.

  That thought touched a chord of memory. When Sir Clement had shown him for the first time the photograph of the conical mount of Araman in the valley, the Englishman had asked if Jacob did not sense something terrifying in it. When he reminded the other of that, Sir Clement shook his head quickly. "Ah, yes. In the German's photograph it looked like an enormous Tower of Silence."

  Michal, thinking of India, had said the same thing.

  "But it's not that, Jacob. It's not a man-made tower." For a moment he reflected curiously. "What inspires terror may not be at all dangerous. In our thoughts we may shrink back from something quite harmless, as Michal used to dread a freshly kindled fire in her bad time. I was quite frightened once at my first sight of your Empire State Building. Yet I suppose several million New Yorkers see it every day without alarm. Now I am certain there is nothing for us to fear in Araman itself."

  "But you have a sense of danger here?" Jacob knew that was true of himself, on Michal's account.

  "Yes, quite unmistakably."

  Jacob reflected that the people of Araman had a habit of watching from the walls, even during the storms.