by Harold Lamb
For a moment Paul was silent, thinking. "We also had cause to mourn, although we did not know it then. Most of our people stayed there in the outer world. They gained much knowledge of the science of numbers and of metals. By that science they had shaped things to do the work of men."
"Such things as a globe of the sky," Jacob put in quickly.
"You have seen them here—the globe of the sky and the astrolabe and the heliograph. We became very skilled in casting bronze."
"Making winged horses," said Michal.
"I suppose so. I know we made swords after that." He was still pondering. "You see we changed—even those who stayed behind at the altar of Araman. We were forsaking old ways and learning new arts—only a few hundreds of us stayed in the mountains—those who had gone out followed Cyrus, not Zarathushtra. Those departed Medes and Persians became like their kindred elsewhere in the outer world, in India and the West; they took and held wealth and land and slaves, which in turn they had to protect. So you see they had not really conquered the great city of Babylon—Babylon had conquered them." Stretching out his good arm, he smiled at Michal. "That's the story our elders tell; I don't know if you'll believe it, but I do."
After a moment he added, "If you doubt it, Captain Ide, look at what is left of Araman today. And there are Babylons that are great cities today in the outer world."
"I don't doubt it, Paul." Jacob was probing toward another truth. "Tell me this. After your isolation was broken and your people scattered, then the name of Araman was known in the outer world."
"Yes"
"And search was made for it."
"From the West—yes. Soon after, by the Romans. Valerian, who is carved in the rock here, came to conquer the East. So did Mark Antony, driven by Cleopatra's ambition. They came with armies and were defeated by Persian horsemen. But Alexander of Macedon, whom you call Alexander the Great, sought for more than that. He searched for the sanctuaries of the East as far as India. The elders say he passed through these mountains on his way to Babylon where he died."
"Julian the Byzantine also?"
"He also sought for the sanctuary of a religion in the East. So my father, Kaimars, said."
For an instant Jacob had the impression of mighty armies mobilized in the West moving against the intangible strength of religions in the East.
Another name had been mentioned that puzzled him. "You say Saladin was a Kurd who went out from these mountains. He certainly waged war in the Holy Land."
"He was also a scholar who hated war. When he had made peace with your Richard of England, he gave all pilgrims the right to journey to Jerusalem. Then he went back to his books and building hospitals."
So Saladin the Kurd had had a mission to perform. Jacob wondered how many others had departed from Araman on such missions.
"And the others?" he asked quietly.
A mask fell over the soldier's tired face. "My father could have told you, Captain Ide. He died in India, in the rioting at Amritsar."
With a glance at the silent Michal, he sprang up. "Why do you try to know more of Araman? Why do you stay here?" He flung out his arm toward her. "I—I want you to live!"
When he had gone, Michal wanted to run to Jacob. She felt afraid because Paul had been afraid, and besides, she was shivering with the night cold.
But Jacob had turned back to Sir Clement's notes, searching for something eagerly. Watching him settle down to reading, she put out the wall lamps and lay down on the divan, her head on a pillow where she could see him without moving. The flame of the one lamp shadowed his high cheekbones and made a thin line of his lips. When she half closed her eyes, his head had the appearance of a skull, motionless. And she longed to touch him and hear his voice.
"Won't you stop, Jacob, and rest?" she asked.
He shook his head. "Not yet. Try to sleep, Michal."
It was better after that. She could imagine that they were lying there, watching the embers of the fire die, thinking of nothing else. She wanted to help Jacob in his quest, but she couldn't. Why did he have to go on alone? Silently, she argued, the shepherds went to Bethlehem, and one spoke to us, and Paul spoke to us, and now I'm afraid again, and Sir Clement isn't here. She blinked at the fire to keep awake, and her eyes closed. When Jacob laid the sheepskin robe over her, she did not stir.
With one of the last notes of the pile in his hand, Jacob sat musing. The words in his hand had been scrawled on a sheet of paper with the heading, Regent Palace Hotel, Baghdad.
Tired, he eased his stiffened limbs by going to the door.
The chill of early morning struck into him. In the darkness he could see only the pin point of red flame upon the altar. When he stared at that, the drifting snow played tricks with his vision. Not only the snow seemed to be moving. Images that he had seen before assumed shape and moved with the drifting snow.
On the cliff the horseman stirred over the kneeling Caesar. Kaiser, the German Kaiser, his mind repeated, was the new word made out of the old word Caesar. Tsar, the imperial Russian Tsar, was a twin new word, also born of Caesar.
Other gray shapes moved out of the locked door across the way. They moved easily into the drifting snow. Falling into line, they followed each other toward the point of light, where they vanished. The first was like an animal—no, it was a heavy, plodding man with a spear, an Assyrian with the face of Sergeant Daniel, except that the face had a beard and the body was hidden by a long robe, like a real Assyrian, the first soldier of old time. A good soldier, carrying a spear.
Behind him followed a chariot. Sword blades were bound to the hubs of the chariot and they turned viciously as it moved. But no one rode in it. Behind it came a bronze standard with eagles.
Then the shapes multiplied and gave forth sounds. Men were marching through the snow, with the hard, quick step of the Roman legions. Armored horsemen with lances uplifted under lofty banners galloped behind the glittering form of an emperor, Barbarossa, leading his host. . . .
They were vanishing now into the snow curtain, to the roll of muffled drums—no longer Roman eagles or crusaders' standards, but the banners of Napoleon retreating through the snow, falling into the ground, stacked in the stands around the tomb under the purple light of the Invalides where Napoleon had been laid for tourists to watch.
Closing his eyes to shut out the purple light, Jacob roused himself by gripping the doorpost. It had been restful to let his mind wander, imagining these shapes. They were not there, except as his tired eyes had formed them. Only the altar fire was real.
I'm imagining things, he told himself, and that will not help any. Often in Cairo, when he had been tired of making out reports, he had drawn a mental picture of what lay beyond his windows, of myriads of human beings armed and in armored machines moving in long columns upon the roads of a doomed civilization—a picture that must lie in the back of anyone's mind if anyone cared to summon it up.
No, he had been looking too long at the altar fire through the drifting snow. Going back inside the curtain, he hesitated, wanting to lie down on the couch close to the warmth of the sleeping woman. That fire, he reminded himself, would certainly be there on the rock the next day.
A memory persisted, troubling him. Somewhere he had read what he was thinking now. Returning to the stand, he picked up Sir Clement's last note that he had not understood, and reread it carefully.
The man who wrote that, in India, must have hated warfare with a consuming passion. "FOR WHAT MAN KNOWETH THE THINGS OF A MAN, SAVE THE SPIRIT OF MAN WHICH IS IN HIM?' So said Paul of Tarsus and so might fulian have said"
Until gray light stole through the opening overhead, Jacob sat with that page in his fingers. He felt as if he were sitting outside a closed door. This feeling was more real than the illusory figures of the drifting snow, and yet, in some unaccountable fashion, bound up with them.
The spirit of man. . .Paul of Tarsus had seen something in the blinding heat of a desert; he had felt a presentiment of truth that had revealed to him the empt
iness of his own life in that hour of Damascus. He had wandered, like Zarathushtra who had followed a river down from these mountains, and like Mani, the Magian who had journeyed eastward to India. Moved by a passion greater than hatred or human love, they had opposed their weak bodies to the march of armies.
Paul of Tarsus. What had he meant by the spirit of man? What had survived of the words he spoke? His letters endured in fragments of papyrus penned by scribes in Greek long afterward. Mani's words had been found only in scraps of lambskin ornamented with pictures scattered through the deserts of Turkestan, where many of them had been used to make panes for windows.
No, the miracle of their lifetime had not survived these men. Ritual had swathed their words with manifold meanings, preserving them only as mummies are preserved. Their memories had hardened into the pages of books. They had departed, and along their footsteps shrines and monuments had risen, with inscriptions carved in stone. The artifacts of their time had survived them.
Could any power restore what they had said in life and bring back their living thoughts? If that could be . . .
Michal waked, feeling that the storm had passed. The sky had brightened above the light well. Pushing off the sheepskin, she looked for Jacob and saw him reading by the fire quietly.
"I'm glad you're here." He smiled at her drowsiness. "We've gone at daybreak to see what is left of Athens, and you can help me there"
Heavy with sleep, she made an effort to sit up. He spoke so sharply, as if she must hurry. Shadowed hollows lay beneath the bones of his face. She asked, "Aren't you hungry, Jacob?" When he shook his head, she remembered. "I'm very glad to be in Greece again. I always liked sitting on the west side of the Parthenon. How can I help you, sir?"
"By sitting on the west side of the Parthenon. What do you see?"
Shaking out her hair, she tried to rouse herself from the delicious drowsiness. "I don't quite know what I'm doing there. But I see the lovely smiling faces of the caryatids. I see the marble blocks of the Parthenon, all gilded by the sun and full of the tiniest cracks, and I can breathe deep." She did so. "Now, going to the edge I can look down on the small roof of my beloved Temple of the Winds, which I like much better than the empty theater of Dionysus."
"Any people moving around?"
"No, only statues, and they don't move."
"Or speak?"
"Not even to say 'Good morning, pet.' Jacob——" She was fully awake now, and worrying.
Going over to the couch, he took her hand. Her warm fingers twined into his. "Good morning, dearest. Now that you've come back from Athens to Araman, I want to thank you for making that long journey. You saw at once what I've been trying to visualize. I've been so blind."
"You've never really been to Athens?"
"No. You told me what is left of it, a necropolis as Daoud would say, a city of the dead. A deserted theater, a ruined temple, the gravestones of a people."
"But they were nice people. You felt it."
Quizzically his tired eyes searched her face, and she thought that he looked as if he were in pain but not unhappy.
"Nice? No, more than that. They were daring and restless; they roved the seas like argonauts and found new islands; they broke away from the dead hand of the past and argued on street corners. They disowned priesthoods and thumbed their noses at fate and pulled the oars of their small boats over the waves of the Great Sea, to explore the world and learn, if they could, the meaning of what they found. In their minds was the glory that was Greece, and nothing else mattered very much. If we could see now what was in their minds, we would know them intimately; there's not very much we can learn from the gravestones they left behind."
"But they also left some magnificent writing in plays or poems which neither you nor I can read—in Greek, that is."
"Yes, they have left us the shadow of a living reality. Didn't their actors all wear masks? We know they could laugh because we have laughed at Lysistrata. But if we read Oedipus we think that they could not escape fear or the nemesis of fate. Perhaps they had too much courage to be so afraid. If only for a moment they could tell us what was really in their minds."
"Now you're wishing, Jacob. I used to wish like that, on the Parthenon, hoping that the lovely caryatids would dance for me—they seemed to be all ready to dance."
"While you were asleep, Michal, a few minutes ago," he said thoughtfully, "I went back to Cairo, to see what might be left of Egypt. I saw the pyramids and mastabas, which were tombs and graves. I saw the temple columns along the Nile, and the tiny images of slaves and animals that had been made to put in graves to help the souls of the dead. I saw the pages of the Book of the Dead, and—that's all. Just a mortuary. Not a trace of the Egyptians who lived and breathed and sang long ago, before a priesthood ruled them and they had to build all those everlasting monuments to death, including the figures of terrible gods with the scavenger heads of dogs or eagles." He broke off, gripping her fingers. "When I was in Cairo before, I admired the monuments and thought what a remarkable people the Egyptians must have been to build such things out of stone. This time I saw only the sad remnant of a cemetery from which the human beings had gone away, and I wanted to follow the people."
Michal thought, this is something new in him; his mind is on edge and passionately eager, and I must be careful in what I say to him.
"Jacob," she began, and checked herself, to add lightly, "So you journeyed to Athens and found the people gone from there too. That was where I came in. What else happened that I missed?"
His eyes looked past her. "I know you feel it, too, Michal—that this place is different from Cairo or Athens. This is no cemetery of the dead past."
"No, Jacob."
"There's a living power here, old as the ages, and still here."
Fleetingly she thought of a gigantic minotaur in a dark labyrinth beneath them.
"It stirred the ancient Egyptians and it voyaged with the young Greeks, because it has sent men out on such missions."
With a quick breath she ventured, "And it still collects assorted weapons from outside?"
He nodded. "Because it has a hatred of war."
"Vasstan thinks it's some mad European."
"Vasstan is thinking about himself. No, it's not any one man but a power greater than an army. Either I'm mad, or miracles have happened, or——" He broke off abruptly. "But we can test it by Vasstan. He certainly doesn't believe in miracles."
When Jacob brought in the German, Michal had the morning tea ready. Hungry and unshaved, Vasstan greeted her with benevolence. "Undine of the mountains!"
With gusto he accepted a bowl of tea, announcing what he termed the morning edition of news for the Americans of the colony. "All the peaks stand clear; the storm has blown away. Sergeant Daniel reports that an independent Kurdistan has been declared at Sanjbulak. It will extend even into the territory of the Soviet Union. You see, I tell you military secrets. I have no secrets now from my friends." He fairly twinkled at her. "I am content to be in Kurdistan. It will perhaps my country become."
He seemed to want to impress his benevolence on them.
"Colonel Vasstan," said Jacob suddenly, "why did the Byzantine Emperor Julian lead an army as far as this—farther than other Roman armies? And just how did he die?"
The sharp question seemed to please rather than annoy the German, who answered decisively.
"East-Roman, Captain Ide. Julian was emperor of the East, the nephew of the great Constantine, who removed the capital to Constantinople late in the fourth century of the Christian era, a little after the Saint George you talk about. You wish the facts of that strange death, not the kindergarten tale?"
Michal thought, he's in an excellent mood, and he wants to please us—I wonder why—yet he still thinks of us as school children. "Please, not the kindergarten story," she begged.
"So I will tell you." Absently he sipped at his tea. "Before then the legions of Rome had been invincible. They had the hard discipline of iron, the iron of the old
Roman citizenry. A splendid machine. Why did it break down?"
Michal waited and Jacob was silent, both aware that the German would answer his own question.
"Those iron-hard legions of Rome which had the rule of the world in their hands and roads as far into the east as the deserts of Araman—they failed to conquer the East and they were broken by barbarians because they became soft. A new religion of the East softened them and took the iron from them."
Christmas and the rebirth of the sun, Sunday and rest day, the green branches and the tree, they were the same once, Michal thought.
"Always," Vasstan pointed out, "a soldier, even the best—the iron-hard legionnaire—is superstitious. When he wakes he looks first to see if a raven or eagle has perched on the standard, and always he looks for signs and portents. If a sign is good, he marches the more willingly; if a sign is bad, he may turn and run. To protect his life, he carries amulets or fetishes. Aber, the new religions of the East, fed enormously the superstition in the legions, especially of the many Asiatics. No more did they have a true will to war. Instead, they repeated the prayers of a Paul of Tarsus, or the invocation learned at a secret shrine of Mani. So did the destruction of the legions begin, and the ruin of the greatest empire. The armies had been infected by the germ of powerful superstition, and they became Christians and Manichees first, and family men, instead of soldiers."