by Harold Lamb
"It might help the political situation," Jacob ventured, "if American and British and Russian archaeologists got together to really examine Araman."
The curator smiled judiciously. He had the manner of a professor explaining very simple points to an imaginative student. "By your own account, Mr. Ide, the Russians are at work already in the field."
"What they are reporting isn't very reliable."
"That's it—that's exactly it. No one can work with the Russians without conforming to their ideology. I regret it, but——"
"I've tried to work with half a dozen of them. It can be done—if we try."
The other only shook his head. Outside the door the dog's head on an Egyptian god stared at Jacob blindly. And a sudden sense of failure made him exclaim, "How do you know it can't be done unless you try? The Russians respect scientists, but they're still suspicious——"
"Of what?"
"Of us. Of the outer powers that have invaded them with superior weapons in the past."
"Nonsense!" The curator's ruddy face turned a shade darker.
Jacob leaned across the desk. "I know it's unheard of to get cooperation from the Kremlin. But this is a chance that may never come again. Politically speaking, the mountains of Kurdistan are still open to us. If we can only throw an expedition into them—be there—make clear that we have an interest——"
"The museum has interest only in the proper advancement of science." The man at the desk seemed to savor his words. "We are not adventurers——"
"When I say we——"
"Please, Mr. Ide!"
Another visitor approached, holding carefully a package of wrapping paper and cotton wool. Handing Jacob back the bronze horse, the curator turned with marked attention to examine the fragment of a blue bowl lying in the wool.
All Monday morning Jacob put nickels in the slots of telephones in the drugstores on Washington streets, trying to speak with Armistead Marly. The voices of women secretaries assured him that Mr. Marly was in conference, that Mr. Marly was on the other telephone, that if he could state his message, a memorandum would be given Mr. Marly. But Jacob could not explain his message to the voice of a busy secretary.
He was startled, when at noon the receiver clicked in his ear and a quick, clear voice said, "Yes? Marly speaking."
Jacob's muscles tensed, and he forced himself to say deliberately, "I'm Jacob Ide. You wouldn't know me, but I have some important information to give you."
There was a brief pause, and the quick voice asked a question. "Are you Captain Ide?"
"Captain or Mister, I don't know"—Jacob's nervousness assailed him—"but I've come back——"
"In what branch of the service, Captain Ide?"
"It used to be G-2. I mean, I was in G-2."
"Did you know an Englishman named Clement Bigsby?"
"Yes." Relief flooded Jacob like a warm bath. This man at the other end of the wire knew something about him and Sir Clement.
"You say you've just come back. From Calcutta, isn't it?"
"No." Jacob laughed. "From Araman."
Again the brief pause, and the quick voice changed in tone. "Can you lunch with me, Captain Ide?"
"Can I—— When?"
"Now. In half an hour."
And Marly's voice directed him to a club a few blocks from the drugstore, as if it were a most ordinary part of a day's work to invite a stranger to lunch because he had come from Araman.
Marly did not glance twice at Jacob's clothes. Slender and obviously under strain, he explained casually that he had slipped out of another engagement so they could have a quiet chat together. At the table he proved a courteous host, ordering little for himself, asking few questions. Although he must have been pressed for time, he waited until his guest had finished and most of the other visitors had left the tables before he allowed Jacob to plunge into his story. By then the statesman's dark eyes had summed him up thoroughly. "So the British posted you through to Washington," Marly observed. "They must have thought it important to do that. You look tired."
"I'm tired of waiting."
"I can understand that. We've had very little news and a great many rumors from the Kurdistan area. Tell me what you wish, in your own way."
He had given Jacob no lead to go on, and he turned to look out the window as Jacob talked, excited and relieved by the attention of the other man who could piece together a picture of the distant mountains out of memory and imagination. Only once did he break in to say, "This is vitally important, to me at least."
At the end he murmured, "I wonder what our cousins the British are doing about it." Then he moved a salt shaker in silence between his fingers while Jacob waited. "It's a chance to do something at last," he almost whispered.
Jacob waited.
"You know that you've brought us a new headache," Marly said curtly at last, "and a big one. We've been through smashing crises over the Dardanelles, Outer Mongolia, the railroad out of Harbin, and Iran. Greece and Trieste also—all avenues of the new Soviet expansionism. They've left our heads aching, and they're not settled yet." He looked up, reaching a decision. "What you have to tell is fantastic, except perhaps to me, and other people here consider me slightly mad. I've no political backing. The best thing for you to do is to talk with the Secretary himself. And he has just flown to London for the ministers' conference." He thought for a moment. "You'll have to wait a week for the chance of seeing him. It's not certain then."
Rising, he went with Jacob to the door. When they passed the uniformed attendants at the entrance desk, Marly seemed oblivious of the fact that his guest looked like a tramp. "Keep in touch every day with my office," he said at parting. "It's important."
Not a word about Jacob's status as an officer absent without leave or dictating a report to be typed out. Marly had time only to think of what was important to the country. Although he spoke so quietly, he was as exhausted as Jacob.
"I'll be in every day," Jacob choked out, "to look for a cable."
There was no cable from Michal that Monday. Jacob had hoped she might send a fast cable to say when she was leaving. But even with the British helping, it would take a little time to arrange for a place on a plane. Two days, after all, was not much time.
When Tuesday passed without a word, Jacob worried silently. Even a delayed cable should have been in by then.
After two days Jacob risked asking Marly to let him telephone through to the legation at Baghdad—a difficult operation because it required connection through London and Cairo. He had a wild hope that in some way he could speak with Michal herself. . .instead the unemotional voice of the charge at Baghdad answered him, and requested him to spell Michal's full name. The charge knew nothing about such a person at the Royal Hospital.
"Then get the hospital," Jacob snapped. "Ask for Sister Miriam—she'll tell you."
"My dear fellow, that might take twenty minutes." The flat voice rose in protest.
"Let it. I'll wait."
It seemed to him longer than twenty minutes while the wires hummed and clashed as if in the grip of a distant storm, until the other's faint voice reached him. "I couldn't get your Sister Miriam——" The humming drowned out the words. "These telephones . . . hospital . . ."
"What?" Jacob cried.
"Miss Thorne left . . . hospital last week."
And the voice stopped, while others uttered broken words over the cacophony of the wires. Jacob put down the receiver helplessly. For a moment he had the feeling that Michal, like himself, had ceased to exist in the city of Baghdad. If he could have talked with Sister Miriam! Michal had left the hospital. She must have sent a message.
All the next day, Friday, he made excuses to stop in at Marly's office, without result. There was no trace of a cable, although toward the end of the afternoon he phoned the other offices connected with the Near East, in the hope that it might have been left elsewhere.
One chance sent a flash of hope through him. While he was waiting at the telephone a depart
ment courier came in, sorting out long sealed envelopes from his unlocked portfolio. This government messenger had flown in from Cairo, and he was distributing his charges hurriedly because closing time was at hand. Jacob lingered, knowing that anything sent by special pouch from Baghdad would be in the Cairo mail. Out of the large manila envelope the first secretary drew three smaller white missives, and, looking them over, shook her head at Jacob sympathetically.
"Don't forget to call in early Monday, Captain Ide," she reminded him. "Mr. Marly requested that you keep well in touch."
It was a little thing, the courier who had delivered no letter, yet it drove Jacob to wander the streets for hours after the battleship-gray State Department had released its employees flooding through the doors. His thoughts raced, telling him that Michal might have been too sorely sick to cable, and who else would do it for her?
He felt very tired, and he walked aimlessly downhill past the towered Pan-American Building to the level stretch of Constitution Avenue, where taxis and cars were speeding away the personnel of the huge war and navy structures. The rush of the cars on the wet pavements was like the sough of a heavy wind. Going on alone, isolated from the human currents that had kept in motion the machinery of government until the hour hands of the clocks touched five, he tasted the bitterness of failure. He had witnessed an incredible thing, the shaping of the future world—for that he knew it to be—and now he could do nothing but wait around an office door, like any place hunter.
It was not like Michal to be silent. He told himself again, what he had thought long ago, that she belonged to the caste of the Britishers such as Sir Clement and Aurel Leicester, who had been so solicitous of her health. That caste might be passing, yet it had its splendor and generosity—and what would replace it?
"Nothing that I am or have," he told himself.
By now he might not only be absent without leave on the army records but sought by the F.B.I. contact with La Guardia Field. Deliberately, he had not sent in the copy of his discharge, because he had not dared to report himself at the G-2 section of the Pentagon nor confront the medical examiners who might send him to hospital. He had to be ready when Marly called for him. He had to wait.
His head down against the rain, Jacob was moving through a park, and no cars passed him now. In the near darkness he became aware, half consciously, of the absence of lights. There was no flickering glare here of marquees and billboards, and for a moment he felt as if he were walking through the country roads he had known long ago, when houses showed only a few lights and he had sailed his sloop between the hills of the upper Hudson.
You could not bring back the past. It left you forever, and became petrified within tombs, embalmed in museums. . .
He was passing a single light that glowed through the rain without being seen. It hung a little above him within the shape of a stone house, and when he looked at it, he saw a man sitting there, unmoving.
"That must be the Lincoln Memorial," he told himself drowsily, and went on, wondering a bit that no living person was there, or nearer to the sitting man than the flickering lights of distant cars hurrying out to Arlington or the airport in the rush of Friday night.
There was something odd about the park and the building with a glow of light, like a home of long ago. Jacob stopped a moment and looked back at it. But still no one went near it, and he limped on.
The faint, unmistakable whirring of motorcycles cut through the darkness, and he thought that some riders were speeding through the park to reach the bridge ahead of the traffic. Why should anyone care to visit the memorial within the park on a rainy week-end night? Under a tree he stopped and tried to make out the hands of his watch. The quivering of his chilled body kept him from seeing the faint hands, but he thought it was after nine, and he would have more than sixty hours to pass before the government offices would open again and he could ask if there was a cable from Baghdad for him. If you loved anyone so much that every minute of uncertainty brought the ache of pain, you ought to get drunk and sleep or try to forget. If you had strength to walk back for miles through the darkness to the lights of a bar.
A shaft of light passed across him. A motorcycle had swung by the memorial building without stopping. Instead of passing him, the motor dwindled to slow chattering and the headlight beam came to rest beside him.
There was only one rider, although the machine had a sidecar. He did not seem to be in uniform, and he asked sharply, "Captain Ide?"
Startled, Jacob hesitated. No one except the authorities would be looking for him. Fleetingly he thought of his missing passport and discharge papers, and laughed because it was fantastic to be cornered like this in the darkness of an empty park. "Yes," he said, "what of it?"
"Will you get in, please? I'll take you back."
When Jacob moved awkwardly into the wet seat beside him, the rider started at once, not speaking until he swung out on Constitution. "You couldn't be reached by phone. You were seen walking along here, and we've been looking for you on the bridge."
Yes, they might have identified him as a man without an overcoat but with a cane, who limped slightly with one foot.
"We just tried the parkway for luck," grunted the rider. "It's no night for a walk. Mr. Marly gave orders to find you."
Jacob laughed. After waiting all week, the machinery of government had reached out to find him hidden in a park. They drew up at a side entrance of the dingy State Building where two policemen loitered. His companion showed a pass and Jacob was admitted. It felt like five years before, after the war had crashed on Washington. "You know the way," said the rider, and turned back.
It felt strange going down the empty corridor and pushing open the white lattice door. At her desk, the first secretary gave an exclamation of relief and smiled as she pressed a buzzer.
"There's no cable, Captain Ide," she said quickly, "but they are waiting for you."
Marly came out, closing the door behind him and speaking in his incisive way. "You took some finding. Iverson's here from the British Embassy. His news is about as bad as could be."
The Secretary was in conference elsewhere and could not be present; but someone else had arrived from Jacob's part of the world by plane that evening.
Marly's quick glance searched Jacob's face. "Do you feel well enough to tell them the situation at Araman?"
"Yes."
"This evening's news has made your information important." The statesman hesitated. "I won't try to tell you how important. But you should know that we are failing in the Anglo-American attempt to neutralize the Dardanelles—to make them an open sea passage without fortification. Iverson reports that Moscow is moving to control your Kurdish mountains. There is a rumor in that the Democratic Kurdish party has sent a petition from Sanjbulak to form a Soviet out of their mountains."
"Yes," said Jacob, thinking of the passenger from that evening's transatlantic plane.
Inside Marly's large room three men sat not at the desk but around the open fire, stretched out as if tasting to the full a few minutes' relaxation. One he recognized as Macomber, a department specialist in western Asia; another—looking like a lean crewman who had trained too long—Marly introduced as Iverson, the Englishman.
The third, the largest of them, appeared to have slept in his clothes and to be still drowsy. But the slitted eyes that examined Jacob briefly were alert and thoughtful. In that moment Jacob had a flash of recognition. This man was unknown to him, yet he had seen the lounging figure before in a different semblance. It might have been one of the passersby on Rashid Street, or by the Golden Gate at Jerusalem. In any case, the other, like himself, had been alone.
Marly did not introduce him by name, saying only that he had just arrived from the East. "You see, the United States has its wanderers also, Jacob."
Iverson smiled fleetingly. "David Khalid happens to be in London at this moment, Captain Ide. You call him Daoud, I believe."
"Then your people have Sir Clement Bigsby's notes," Marly flashed.
>
"I see no need to deny it here."
It was easier to talk to them after that, by the crackling fire, with the patter of rain against the windows, and the bronze Pegasus on the table between them. Jacob stood by the fire and could see Paul's face again; the saga of the Watchman came back in words to him, and centuries of time fell away, from the walls of Washington, to the distant ranges of Araman.
Half consciously he was aware that Macomber, who had been fidgeting with papers in a brief case, put away his case to sit back intent; Marly, who had gone to answer the faint buzz of the telephone, spoke into it quietly and it did not ring again. Instead, the secretary came in, to sit at Marly's desk and take down what Jacob was saying.
Two hours later, tired, he still spoke to them.
"I know it seems like a mad idea here in Washington, but not if you had been there in those mountains. They were a paradise once. Call it the cradle of civilization, or anything you like—it was there.
"Those mountains can be set apart as a sanctuary of the nations. It can be done. We've done as much in this country for bison and Indians. We wouldn't have to build—we'd only be keeping what is there. Those mountains have known peace until now, because they were remote. What is to prevent keeping that peace by international agreement?
"In Araman the first systematic attempt was made to wage war against war by influencing the minds of human beings. That's just what our existing agencies of international accord profess to do, without being able to accomplish it. The men of Araman showed us a line of action, and God knows we ought to be able to do better than they—not by merely creating a theater for study, but by establishing a center for the ablest scientists of the nations, Russians as well as Chinese and Indians and Westerners, as a first step for destroying warfare itself.
"You have such a centering of refugee scientists in the United States today, out of the last war. You can have more in Araman. You would draw the best type of volunteer brains to Araman from the outlying nations. Police its frontiers, if you must, with the guards of the small nations around it, Turkey, the Armenian Soviet, Iraq, Iran, and the Soviet of Azerbaijan—but protect it with the might of the United States. At long last let our nation, let all of us, do something instead of talking about it.