by Harold Lamb
"Asia would understand it. Asia remembers the meaning of sanctuary, which we have forgotten—almost. Paul said that the influence of religion in Asia is fighting now against the overwhelming power of arms made in the West. Those religions are scattered now—give them a meeting ground, the Hindus, the Zoroastrians, the Kurds, the Jews, and the Moslems. The Christians may wait at the monastery at the gate, but they are there too."
The listeners sat quiet. Jacob felt a sense of weariness in trying to put into words the longing that drove him to speak.
"What have we in the West that could equal Araman? The council of the United Nations debates like the League of Nations, moving from city to city, among hotel accommodations. Seat it in Araman, and the Asiatics would know that it belongs to them too. Build a new city, belonging to no nation but to humanity in the mass. Asia, that has had its sacred palaces and forbidden cities, would wake to the grandeur of that.
"It can be done, because Araman was real once. If we are ready to put our lives into the scale against armaments, we can accomplish what was done in the time of Paul of Tarsus and Mar Giorgios.
"And if it is not done—if the vestiges of Araman are carried off, mined, exploited, turned into national monuments and strategic bases for war—how will you answer the question, what can be done? If you can't do this, what can you do?"
When he had said his last word, the three at the fire put questions to him, probing for details, seeking out uncertainties. Their questions touched what he had seen and heard—not his dream of a sanctuary. And in his weariness he could not tell what they might be thinking as they pondered. Macomber, he knew, was skeptical.
Marly put an end to the questioning by asking their opinion in turn. "Before Captain Ide leaves, have you any comment, Mr. Macomber?"
The expert shrugged. "It's really not I, but the Russians who have a comment. They have established a fait accompli. In other words, they have absorbed Araman into the Russian zone."
And Iverson murmured, "If they lose Araman, it would break their new frontier line from the Dardanelles to India by which they hope to control Asia. Will they do it?"
Macomber said: "Their line runs through to Dairen now."
"In wild surmise," Iverson quoted softly, "silent, upon a peak in Dairen."
Marly said, looking into the fire, "They are the youngest of the great nations, afraid, and blundering in their efforts at statecraft."
Jacob exclaimed: "Yes. Don't you see? It's not the Russians alone. It's something else. It's the power politics of all the great nations, closing in on Araman like a vise."
There was a moment of silence. Jacob tried to gather himself together. "I know you think I'm crazy about this," he said then. "But aren't the Russians—the mass of them—afraid of us because they don't know us as we really are? Set up Araman right next door to them, and they'll know about that. Make it the first force for peace, and they can't help but learn it is just that."
"It's in the Kremlin's area of influence. Would it be permitted?" demanded Macomber.
"No!" cried Jacob. "Not if you sit here and write papers about it. Go there, and do it!"
A slight shake of the head from Marly warned Jacob that these men knew far more about the Russian enigma than he, and he was silent.
"Mr. Iverson," Marly said then, "would you care——"
"Of course I'll give my opinion as an individual." Surprisingly, the Englishman smiled. "You know our great oil fields at Kirkuk, Masjid-i-Sulaiman, and elsewhere, are within artillery range of your mountains, Captain Ide. Five years ago we should never have agreed to such an allocation of neutral territory. Now I can say that we should be most happy to agree to it, most happy. But now I feel, as an individual, that it cannot be done.,,
"Is that all?" Marly asked.
"All, except a whimsy." Iverson paused, but Marly still waited for him. "Ah, you want that? Your President, Abraham Lincoln, once made a most remarkable speech in a few words. In it he asked men to dedicate themselves to something."
Nodding at Jacob, he added, "In the manner of youthful Paul, to dedicate themselves to a task. My thought is merely that if he had made that speech let us say on the steps of the White House, it would indeed not have been long remembered. But he spoke on a certain space of ground, set aside, the battlefield of Gettysburg. His words invoked what had happened on the earth beneath his feet. I believe they have always been known as the Gettysburg speech. My thought, I repeat, is that our own declarations to dedicate ourselves to make an end of war should have less weight here or in London than if they were spoken on the battlefield of Araman, with the first earth dedicated to peace beneath our feet."
"The last, best hope of earth," repeated Marly.
Then he came over to Jacob. "You should be in bed now, Captain Ide, and resting."
By that Jacob understood that the others would carry on the discussion among themselves, and that, his part having been played, his usefulness had ended. Marly still held his arm. "Kurdistan is now the spot of greatest potential danger on earth," he observed. "I do not know, of course, but I think the United States Government will move urgently in the next hearing of the Security Council to create a sanctuary of the nations there."
Iverson moved slightly. "In that case, His Majesty's Government would concur." And the stranger, who had been looking out the dim window, turned curiously.
"And I am certain," Marly said quietly, "we will fail. But we shall have made the first attempt. The next generation may succeed where we have failed."
The stranger broke his long silence: "If there is a next generation like ours."
When no one spoke after that, Jacob realized they were waiting for him to leave and that he had done all he could.
Taking the bronze horse, he went with Marly to the door, and alone into the outer office. As he was leaving, the secretary called from her desk: "Captain Ide, there's a letter for you."
And she gave him a small blue envelope, saying that it had come by the hand of the last courier. It was not sealed and it had an Iraqi stamp.
Michal's writing flashed up into his eyes in diminutive words. He pulled open the flap and took out a single sheet of paper, then stepped through the door, to read in the quiet of the corridor.
For,a moment he had to steady his hand holding the paper.
Dearest Jacob,
I am going away. My temperature is better, and Dr. Ishaq is quite proud of me. But I do not feel well in this room. My head roars when the planes pass overhead. Aurel is the kindest soul alive, and my affection for him grows. He questions me so often, thought about the tragic things at Araman. And when the other British officers probe me like something on the dissecting table about politics I feel as if a chill hand had been laid on my heart.
Jacob, it's foolish of me, and I know—you don't have to scold me, darling—that I ought to try to get back my strength and some clothes and arrange for a place in the plane to the westward. But there's something in me I cant change, after these last months, and it cries out against starting west.
Am I being a coward? I was never brave about some things. I am only a woman, who does not know how to escape pain except by running away.
Father Hyacinth came in the other day, with a basket of walnuts. He said the winter wheat was doing well at the monastery, and I have bought some peony seed and jonquil roots. Sergeant Daniel is there with his family, at Saint George's, and Mr. Svetlov took refuge there. He is reading Hamlet now. And they are going to bring back the bell. I can't help it, Jacob—it's not like our paradise, is it? But it's the only real refuge for me. And, Jacob, Tm going back with Father Hyacinth, to wait there. I went there our first night, Jacob, and if I dont have something around me to remember by, I feel afraid.
She had written Write me soon how you are and had scratched it out to scrawl instead Jacob, come quickly!
Without seeing it, he stared at the sheet of paper in his fingers. The date was a week ago. If she had gone by car with the officers to Riyat, she would be up the mou
ntainside now and waiting in the shelter of Saint George's.
Suddenly a flash of dread touched him—the most dangerous spot on earth, Marly had said. Over the cloud level, in the home of Mar Giorgios, Michal had found her sanctuary. Then he heard her telling him of it, gaily, and of the garden she would plant when the snow melted. There was her portion of land, dedicated to peace, with the children and the strays of the mountainside, the refugees from war gathered there, even studying. This was no dream, but reality. And Michal had made it real.
"Michal," he cried, "you blessed idiot!"
The four men gathered around the desk glanced up in sharp surprise when he hurried through the door. Marly frowned, then asked courteously, "Is there anything I can do for you, Captain Ide?"
Now Jacob had no doubt about that. His fingers clung to the paper. "Yes," he said in a breath. "I'm no use here after tonight. I might be useful out there. In the mountains, Marly. I only left them to report here."
"I had no idea you meant to go back," Marly protested.
"But I'm going."
The stranger by the window looked up once, with something like assent.
Iverson felt a need to warn the impulsive American whose imagination seemed to run away with his sense of values. "It's hardly the safest place to select at the present moment, Captain Ide."
"I'm not so sure about that."
Macomber broke in impatiently. "But what possible use is there in your going? The Department couldn't be responsible for you. Not," he added carefully, "that we would not be glad of an observer in Kurdistan."
"What use would I be here, or in New York?" Jacob felt confident of his answer. "I can't tell you in so many words what I might do. Nor could Paul tell me in Cairo. But he believed an American would be able to help."
Iverson smiled, while Armistead Marly studied Jacob curiously. "It would take several weeks," he observed, "to arrange for your passport."
Something broke loose in Jacob, shouting in derision. He felt as if a wind of the heights had swept through the room, touching him, sending the blood pulsing through him, making him warm and certain. "Damn the red tape, Marly, and put me on a plane tonight. You can do it."
When the statesman, exasperated, glanced at his watch, Jacob cried out. "At eleven-thirty at night in the rain you can do it. I've done something for you. Any department courier rates passage without delay, even if he's carrying last year's statistics of sterling transactions in pigskins from Aleppo. Fix me up as a special courier—give me blank paper sealed up—anything. There'll be planes leaving soon or late."
The gaunt man by the window spoke again. "A C-54 leaves New York at five forty-five."
Marly hesitated. "If you'll wait until we have finished, I can see——"
"Forget departmental procedure for once, until afterward. Don't you understand? You must let me go. Let me go!"
In the silence that followed, three out of the four men wondered at the change in this quiet officer who stormed at a night's delay in going to a destination of danger. The fourth, who had just come from the East, understood.
In the high rotunda of the air terminal only a few passengers waited drowsily with their bags or newspapers or children, scattered along the benches facing the great plate-glass window that was like the transparent curtain of a stage. Beyond that curtain extended the vista of the air through which an unseen wind drove a mist of rain, lighted fleetingly by the green and red glimmers of ascending planes and the flash of a landing light.
When the mechanical summons of the loud-speaker called them, groups rose obediently from the benches and departed down the passageway into that other world of the elements.
Against the window Jacob rested his shoulder, moving his hand upon the cold glass, feeling still the wind that had followed him out from the streets in a speeding taxi. The policemen who watched the entrances eyed him with some curiosity, taking due note of his worn suit, the absence of even an overnight bag or raincoat. And it seemed to them that he looked hungry. He looked as if he had not sat down to a meal in days.
Many strange figures passed through this terminal of the air, but Jacob at the window did not move away or get himself a copy of the morning papers. Stubbornly he kept in his place, his eyes following each giant machine that turned and trundled away, reverberating, as if there could be joy in the sight of them.
One of the policemen, stirred by languid curiosity, made his way toward the man at the window who might have no other business here than the likelihood of picking up someone's neglected bag, or even taking advantage of the warmth of the rotunda for the night. The policeman thought he should not be there.
Then something happened. The man left the window.
The loud-speaker was intoning a name. "Captain Jacob Ide, please. Captain Ide, passenger, wanted at the information desk."
The man hurried, in spite of a slight limp, past the policeman. He hurried as if it was important to him not to lose a minute. And his thin face was transfixed with joy.
The policeman, vaguely disturbed, watched him go up to the information counter where a government messenger waited with a small pouch. The loud-speaker fell silent.
It was all right, the policeman thought—it looked queer, but it was all right.
C'est la tragédie du monde moderne . . . les vieilles civilisations qualitatives, qui avaient pour but la perfection et non la puissance, sont notre paradis perdu.
On trouve encore en Asie ce qu'on ne trouve presque plus en Europe, des restes vivants de ce grand passé.
Guglielmo Ferrero
This is the tragedy of the modern world . . . the old finer civilizations which had for their fulfillment perfection and not power, are our lost paradise.
You can still find in Asia what can hardly be found in Europe now, the living remains of this great past.
ABOUT HAROLD LAMB
Harold Lamb's father was an artist, which may help to explain the author's own artistry with words and his remarkable ability to see people and the history they made as an integrated whole. For Lamb does with words what an artist does with colors and form—combining, blending, emerging with a central beauty.
He has been writing "as far back as I can remember. In college, Columbia University, I had already been drawn toward digging up the past in the Central Asia field. The kind of thing you can't let go, once you begin it." First there were stories in Adventure, and in Collier's, with Central Asia as the theme. Then the memorable Genghis Khan, written in four weeks, which has been translated into most of the European and some Asiatic languages. Tamerlane followed.
It took two years, during which Mr. Lamb traveled and studied in Asia and the Near East, to write The Crusades. And it took two volumes to publish it. It became a best seller immediately.
More great books followed: The March of the Barbarians, The Flame of Islam, Alexander of Maced on, and others. And now Mr. Lamb's first novel, A Garden to the Eastward, the fruit of intimate understanding of Central Asia and a creative imagination.
HAROLD LAMB is a superb storyteller. In A GARDEN TO THE EASTWARD he has created a strange and truly beautiful novel—the story of two people to whom the war brought only pain and disillusionment; of the ancient bronze winged horse that led them to search for a seven-thousand-year-old civilization beyond the hills of Kurdistan; of how their search brought them to the remnants of the first earthly paradise. . .and understanding. . .and solace.