Little Lost Lambs at the Post

by Harold Lamb

  That was how we came to turn out of the Zahidan road and detour into the Kavir, over the fantastic paving blocks that made a roadway through drifting sand. I had to let Bill try it.

  At the first drift of sand. Bill leveled two tracks with the spade and slid the car through. On account of the halfburied paving blocks, we had to go slow, while the heat rose around us like something solid.

  Soon we came to another drift of earth over our right of way. It was clay this time, hardened by the heat. We decided to try to detour, after letting most of the air out of the tires. While I watched for the line of the asphalt, Bill steered around pockets of loose sand.

  By then the red sun was lowering in the dancing haze. Nine miles, the speedometer showed, we had made in an hour. I had to look down at my knees to check on my eyesight, and when I did that the taste of salt sweat proved I was still awake. In three hours we progressed twenty-one miles, but we were back on the weird paving again, and actually making some speed.

  Doing that, we almost pitched into the narrow gully. It had been carved by water out of the desert's ribs. But by what water? Even my inexperienced eye told me the excavating had been done centuries before.

  However that might be, the arroyo seemed to be our journey’s end. We could still turn back on our track and find the exit, with luck. I looked at Bill. He searched the gully’s edge until he found a place where we could work the car across, using his wire tracks.

  "Look,” I said stupidly, "if this paving was washed out by a flash flood a few centuries ago, our road must be that old.”

  With a nod he kept on with his spadework.

  My thoughts were hitting a crazy rhythm—Romans or no Romans, no roads or aqueducts could be this far in the desert. You couldn’t bring water to a burned-out land or find one slim body lying in thirty thousand square miles. . . . Beyond the gully the paving had vanished, and we were edging forward by sense of direction among rock ridges assailed by motionless waves of sand.

  "Something must be out here,” Bill said, not particularly to me, "or the road would not run this way.”

  The sun, round and red, had been straight ahead. Now it faded out totally. For a minute it was easier to see around. And what I saw was a tidal wave of oversized sand dunes. Not by any conceivable means could the coupé be worked over or around them.

  When we reached the sand crests, Bill got out and took his binoculars, water jar and flashlight. He looked at me, and I got out, too, to walk on. By force of habit, I pulled the key out of the car and pocketed it.

  When the sky line began to blur, I told Bill we’d better climb a high crest to take a look around while the light lasted. This took some doing, because the stones and sand slid away beneath us. On the ridge I felt the emptiness of the space around us. Until then we’d both been thinking about the road going someplace. As I quartered the horizon, searching for any sort of landmark and observing nothing, sand stung my eyes.

  "Wind,” muttered Bill. And he pointed almost dead ahead. "What’s that?”

  A big black object showed near a scattering of small dots. Seen through the glasses, it resolved itself into a man in a dark cape, accompanied by a dozen or so black goats.

  The pulse in my brain took notice of the goats. Goats meant water and growing things. Even here. Bill was thinking of the man. "Maybe he could tell us something.” Both of us started walking fast toward those other living organisms.

  Then the breath of the Kavir struck us. Darkness closed in, and air, rushing across the cinder-bed depression, wrenched up the surface sand with suffocating force. We tried to run.

  After twenty minutes or so, I felt Bill’s hand under my shoulder. Then a tall figure in a flapping black robe, looking like something out of the Old Testament, grabbed my other arm and hauled us ahead into the wind, while black goats galloped around.

  After running like that, hell-bent into the sandstorm, our new guide stopped at the edge of a hole—a sizable square hole. Into this the goats disappeared. Our herder led us down a flight of dirt steps in the side of the hole. Down fifteen feet or so we struck bottom. I found I could breathe again, because the worst of the sand was passing overhead.

  Also we could see. A fire glowed in the center of the pit, and around the fire a bunch of hard-looking tribesmen gave us the once-over. They had women and kids along, all in complete make-up, with wool coveralls and tattooing on their foreheads. One of them, a patriarch with a luxuriant uncut beard, was chopping up some meat with a hatchet, and the hatchet was bronze.

  "Alhamdillah" he said.

  That meant something like "God protect us,” and I tried to tell him yes, "Bally, hazoor."

  Bill pointed down at the floor of the excavation. It was mosaics between the sand heaps. Over it the black goats paraded into an open passage where I heard water running. Bll gave a sudden deep gasp.

  In that passage flickered an oil lamp, and Barbara Duncan was carrying it. We just stared at her as she walked out under her own power, intact. Only when she recognized Bill her eyes opened wide and her slight head bent back. "Bill, did you have much trouble finding me?”

  He shook his head. "Any damage, Barb?” he asked.

  "Superficial bruises where they don’t show.” Just for a second, her lips tensed and she reached out to touch him, telling him how the plane had swooped down when the engine died—the pilot was flying low—and how, when she became fully conscious again, the pilot was dead and the people were collecting around. "They carried me here.” Then she smiled at us. "Archaeology has its uses. I thought you might know about this place, Bill.”

  "I didn’t know about it. What is it?”

  She looked at us, puzzled. "Don’t ask me, but it’s certainly something. If you didn’t know . . . then how did you get here, Mr. Kettrick?”

  How did we? "In my opinion, Barbara,” I ventured, "Bill got here by guess and by God. A goatherd helped.”

  "Then you’ve never been to my city before?”

  Our faces must have answered her, because she laughed, saying that she wasn’t suffering from shock. "I’ve been dwelling comfortably in marble halls, complete with running water.”

  Even the Romans didn’t build cities like subways, underground. But somebody else did, long ago. They delved deep. The troglodytes. "Your troglodyte city?” I asked.

  "Sure.” Bill stepped on my foot. "I can hear the water running.”

  That slip of a girl could read our minds. "All right,” she retorted. "Come and see. The lighting’s the worst feature.”

  From then on I didn’t believe what we saw, but there it was—water flowing in a stone channel, and at the end of the passage a marble archway leading to a street like the gallery of a mine, yet lined with brick walls.

  At an intersection Bill flashed his torch on a marble shrine that showed a man fighting a bull, or something to that effect. Underfoot, the way was piled with dirt and broken bricks. The water conduit, however, had been carefully cleared. The water was so cold it stung my eyes when I dipped my face into it. It seemed to come out of a small tunnel where solid dirt blocked the street. I remembered that in Persia they had a way of channeling water underground from mountain springs to keep it from drying up.

  Barbara led us through a columned doorway into a chamber that smelled of sandalwood. Here the fine marble walls had been incised with the tracery of a garden. Putting down the lamp, she seated herself on a settee of purplish stone with a pair of small lions for arm rests.

  "Porphyry,” said Bill, touching the stone. "Strictly reserved for royalty.”

  "There’s only one chair, Bill, but the sand is clean and makes a fine bed.”

  "One throne, Barb. Only his or her majesty can sit; other folk must stand.”

  "Well, it’s lovely.”

  She was lovely herself, leaning against the tapestried stone. Bill’s eyes never left her. All the tension of two days had gone from the two youngsters. They had no trouble adjusting themselves to an underground palace.

  "I’m a mess,” she sa
id, "sitting where Alexander the Great sat, or did he?”

  "Probably,” agreed Bill, "he did.” With that his interest showed and he began to inspect the throne room with his flashlight.

  Now the goats had followed us in, and some children had trailed along. When Bill flashed his torch, it got a big reaction from the desert urchins. They had not seen anything of the kind before. We three foreigners and the torch were something out of their world. That meant they’d never been out of the Kavir Desert.

  While Bill made his examination and Barbara waited expectantly, I tried to get my sleep-drugged brain to function. Obviously these half dozen families weren’t troglodytes, but present-day nomads. They’d never built this subterranean metropolis, which looked like the finest Greek work, two thousand years old, at least, if Bill was right.

  No, they were squatters who had happened on the water here a few years or a generation ago and had made themselves at home with their animals. Barbara said only the patriarch—she had christened him Methuselah—had lived any time in the outer world of cars and radios. At this point in my reconstruction of the situation the adult tribesmen came in, bringing a platter of meat-and-greens stew with three bowls of goat’s milk curds and water. Bill and I ate and drank and cooled off and smoked the first cigarettes in hours, while Barbara showed us a chest of aromatic wood half buried in the sand.

  "My treasure chest,” she told Bill.

  It looked like one. Out of it she took things she’d gleaned from the dirt—bronze hairpins, a turquoise shaped like a woman’s head, a length of dusty leather inscribed with Greek lettering, and last, a delicate armlet of pure gold. "I’ve put in my spare time polishing it,” she explained, "and I love it.”

  The bracelet, with its delicate tracery of figures, was the work of a master, a Greek master. Slowly she put it on her wrist, watching Bill frowning over the inscription he couldn’t read.

  "What does it say?” she asked eagerly.

  He only shook his head dumbly.

  She came right back at him. "Then what is this place? Haven’t you thought it out yet, Bill?” When he shook his head again, she persisted, "There’s more writing on the wall. Even I can make out some of the words; 'helios,' meaning the sun, and 'hecatompylae,’ which would be 'a hundred gates’——"

  "What did you say?” I demanded.

  "Hecatompylae."

  "That’s it!” I shouted. "The lost city of Asia!”

  I had heard enough talk about it, and Bill had read about it too. On the records, it had been one of the great caravan cities two thousand years ago. Sometime between then and now, it had vanished, apparently, off the map. No archaeologist had spotted its remains. Herzfeld had looked for the missing city north of here, and Schmidt had tried searching the desert by plane, hoping to sight the outline of its streets. Underground like this, it hadn’t been visible. "Why, it’s like finding a new Pompeii," I ended up.

  For an instant, sheer excitement flashed in Bill's tired eyes. "More than that, Terry. This dry wind has preserved it as it was. All it needs is excavating.”

  "Is it as important as that, Bill?” Barbara breathed.

  Still the mystery remained. Why should Hecatompylae be underground instead of on the surface like other cities?

  "Bill,” she cried, "you are going to excavate Hecatompylae!”

  "I?” He stared at her.

  "Who else discovered it?” "Actually, you did.”

  "Oh, jiminy-crows!” She was all excited, telling him this was his chance. A thing like this didn't happen twice in anybody’s life. He ought to fly to the Metropolitan Museum with specimens. He had a right to, and it would mean recognition as an archaeologist.

  "Barb,” he told her, "I only know a little about American archaeology. It would take Orientalists like Herzfeld who know the meaning of a shred of pottery to work at this.”

  She didn’t give in easily. Couldn’t he study their discovery, and make a report of it and claim a share in the work?

  Stubbornly, Bill shook his bony head. The discovery would have to be reported to the Iranian Government, with any objects taken from the site. He tried to joke about it. "If it was a Maya vestige in Navajo ritual or the date of an arrowhead, I might qualify.”

  "And who would care but the Navajos?” She tried to keep the disappointment out of her voice. It seemed to hurt her physically to watch him handling reverently the writing on the leather he could not read. Like a boy who did not dare touch what belonged to adults. "Then what are you going to do. Bill?” she whispered.

  While she watched, his head went down on his arms and he stretched out, asleep. For the first time in three days, I guessed. She just sat there fingering the gold armlet.

  At the first spark of sunrise I climbed out of Hecatompylae and found the two of them parked on the crest of a sand dune as full of wonder as a pair of Noah's children after the last of the flood. For those few minutes the Kavir was cool, with the bare earth crimson underfoot—without a trace of the buried city. Its inhabitants moved through that incredible light watering some patches of verdure where the goats grazed.

  Putting down his binoculars, Bill called "Hi!” Somehow he had changed overnight. I heard him tell Barbara that he went crazy when he looked at her, and he’d been a fool, and now he was going to try to grow up. To me, he admitted that Barbara had been right—the big chances were out here, and he was going to get himself a job with an oil company while he studied archaeology on a global scale.

  "We’ve solved the mystery of Hecatompylae, Terry,” he cried, "in the dawn’s early light! It isn’t a mystery at all! Look around, man! What do you see?”

  "Sand and wind," I responded.

  "Sand and wind did it. This city was never built underground. Hecatompylae grew up, long ago, among lakes and groves which have been burned away to this salted wasteland. Terry, it must have been a thriving metropolis on the trade route that's dwindled to our Meshed-Zahidan road. Here it traded gold for frankincense, and unknown poets made rhymes about its hundred gates. Then plague or invasion scattered its people, as the Mayas were scattered; the trade route shifted to a new course, and the wind piled sand over the city.”

  Listening, Barbara seemed to be dreaming on her own.

  "Then Methuselah’s people dug out a few of the streets for their quarters."

  She sat with her chin on her knees, her eyes hidden, at least from me. "Just as we’re beginning to enjoy Hecatompylae,” she said, "along comes the cavalry."

  Sure enough, seven or eight riders were moving up over the dunes where Bill and I had come the day before.

  "They’re armed," said Bill thoughtfully, "and I've a notion they aren’t tribesmen."

  Through the glasses I made out that they all carried rifles of different types, and wore parts of uniforms with cartridge belts. Drifters, I thought, scum of the modem frontiers armed with relics of the late war.

  Apparently Methuselah and his citizens of Hecatompylae sized up the riders the same way. Our tribal hosts, down to the babes on the hacks of the other children, gathered around us as if for mutual protection. And they, too, were armed, with clubs and crude bronze axes and a strange weapon—long leather double thongs with a pocket, midway. Slings. The young boys were grabbing up handy smooth stones. I thought of David standing up to Goliath. But Goliath never had a service rifle.

  Just then the horsemen began shouting at us.

  "They want!” Methuselah yelped at me, jumping up and down. "You give!” But what?

  We didn’t find out because one of the invaders sent a slug into the thick of our party. Evidently the citizens of Hecatompylae knew what it meant, because they started a rush for the main entrance, pulling us along. I had a glimpse of the riders racing after us; then things happened without a break. Cascading down the steps, our mob poured into the galleries with goats and urchins tangled underfoot. I went blind as a mole, coming in from the sunlight, but I sensed that we were pushed into the main street.

  Then all at once there was silence,
except for heavy breathing. In that silence Bill’s torch flashed close to me, lighting up the man-and-bull shrine. His free arm held Barbara behind him. More than that, the flash disclosed the male citizenry of our town drawn up across the street in skirmish line, with their slings and clubs. Behind them, the women were feeling for hefty rocks. I thought: Whatever they're doing, they've done before.

  "Watch yourself, Terry,” said Bill.

  At that particular moment he didn’t hesitate or fumble. He, too, acted as if he'd rehearsed this scene before. Barbara squealed as he threw her down.

  "Look out!” shouted Methuselah.

  Feet thumped and voices barked down in the entrances—men crowding in blocked the glimmer of daylight. One of them emptied a revolver, five shots, into the darkness our way. Then our street filled with struggling, screaming human bodies, with rides going off and the echoes sounding like doomsday on the way. At least to me.

  Between crashes and splinterings, I heard the swishing of slings and flying stones.

  I heard Bill’s voice. "Terry, I think our crowd likes the dark. They ought to see in it better than the Nips.”

  The swishing of the slings and rattle of the stone slugs went on, with Bill’s voice. "Let’s help our gang,” he said, and flicked the torch on and off, down-street. He was lying pretty much on top of Barbara, behind a dirt pile, and he said how knives and short clubs had been handiest in the dark of the caves of Buna. Men began to yell with pain. Those sling stones must have hurt. The Davids were walloping the Goliaths, even with rifles, in the security of the dark. It pays, in certain circumstances, to be a troglodyte.