Little Lost Lambs at the Post

by Harold Lamb

  You see, something very unusual had happened. A two-man Soviet archaeological expedition had crossed the frontier into Iran—or Persia, as most people call it—and one of the two claimed to be this Professor Razin, of the Academy of Sciences. On the surface it looked harmless. Why shouldn’t Razin come out of his retirement, as it were, to explore his old haunts in the deserts? On the other hand, under the guise of innocent archaeology, this expedition might have been sent out to explode some political dynamite in the new Soviet fashion. If the man who called himself Razin should turn out to be somebody else, we would know that for a fact, and could take counteraction.

  "Would you recognize him, after twenty years,” I asked Mike, "if you saw him now?”

  If he could talk to him, Mike decided, he would recognize him. Mike’s gray eyes probed into me. "You mean this is on the upper up?” he demanded. "Something to do for you, Jim?”

  I didn’t realize then—thinking of all I had to phone to Washington—what this might mean to the Finn, to do something for what he shared here in the U.S.A. Here, under the trees by the pond where carefree kids played.

  The time factor was urgent for us. The next morning I brought to his hotel room the things we’d got together for him—the new green-and-gold passport with photo, the medical certificate that looked all right, along with the plane ticket. He could hardly believe all these were for him. But he was ready to start, with a new money belt and folding money, a thousand of his own that he’d drawn from his bank.

  "Jim, I will find Razin,” he said. "And then I will tell you for sure.”

  First off, Mike got excited about his mission. He’d never been up in a plane before. Come night, he didn’t sleep—what with watching the moon light up a sea of clouds and trying to read a copy of Razin’s last book, something about a journey through a desert, dated 1938, that I’d dug up for him. When he got to the Rome airport one of our agents handed him a ticket for the outgoing KLM.

  When he came to earth in the glare of the Teheran military airport, a quiet American boy named Steve—otherwise Major Dawson, our local air attache—met Mike and, asking no questions, drove him straight to a small office in the shaded garden of the American Embassy. Steve told him, "Your friends went southeast by car five days ago. If you still want to catch up with them, it isn’t going to be so rosy.”

  But Mike was still excited by his cloud riding. He felt fine, although tired, sitting in like this with the others of the embassy, who came in ostensibly for drinks. The political climate of Iran just then was as hot as the temperature out in the garden. "In my opinion,” argued the oldest diplomat, "the Razin outfit is a phony.”

  He believed that because all the Russian crowd in Teheran, from the ambassador to Razin and Kavtaraz, the leaders of the expedition, had taken such pains to explain they were on their way to explore a desert east of Iran. "And for what?” he demanded of Mike. "Why, for a lost valley, and inside the valley a city of ancient days still standing as the inhabitants left it. But who would build a city in a desert outside civilization? Malarkey.”

  "Hamun,” objected Mike, who took his English literally, "is the name of the valley. And the city is there.”

  While the others stared, he produced his Russian book that described the journey of Sergei Razin out to the deserts years before, where the professor had sighted white marble ruins that he had been unable to explore—Razin believing that the valley had dried up so that human beings could no longer live there.

  "What you say,” countered the diplomat, "proves what I think. Anyone could have read that book of the real Razin. No, in my opinion somebody in the Kremlin has worked up the gag of this search for a ghost city. If so, our recent distinguished visitors from the Soviet may be on their way to explode something in this area of tension from India to our oil fields. Perhaps a local war. I know the Iranians suspect as much, but are afraid to interfere without proof. By the same token”—he nodded at Mike—"it could be dangerous for you to try to follow the Razin cars. We can’t help you on the eastern frontier. You’d better sleep on it tonight.”

  Mike did not have to think about that. According to his notions, he would be letting us down if he didn’t catch up with the Russians as soon as possible. "Today, please,” he begged. "I go on today for sure.”

  Steve shook his head. "Not for sure, brother. If we start now, we may make the Zahidan airstrip before dark. On the other hand, we can’t come down without lights, and Zahidan has no lights. What do you say?”

  "Thank you, Steve,” said Mike.

  There was no moonlight glamour riding Steve’s old T-ll plane across the red barrens of Central Iran at noon. Jolting in the copilot’s seat beside the young officer, Mike Mailenin dozed.

  They came down at Zahidan with the furnace glow of the setting sun behind them. Squinting against the heat of the baked earth, they searched through the rusted barbed wire and the empty sheds that had served truck convoys bringing aid to Russia out of India years before. And they learned that Sergei Razin and his party had left at daybreak, twelve hours before.

  "They went east,” explained the solitary Britisher at the table by the door of the guest bungalow, "into the limbo.”

  "Where?” put in Mike.

  "Across the frontier,” said Steve hastily, "into the deserts. Into temperatures of one-oh-five to one-two-oh Fahrenheit. I guess that ties it.” He had no authority to go out of Iran, and there was no place to the east where he could set down the T-ll nearer than the Quetta field. "Tomorrow, doctor. I’ll fly you back to Teheran.”

  Mike looked around. He spotted a wartime jeep by the bungalow, and said he could follow the others by car.

  "Hardly,” said the Britisher, staring over his drink. He was a tired, lank man in shirt and shorts, a transport officer. The Russian archaeologists, he said, trekked out with two lorries, a four-wheel-drive car, tow ropes, and native helpers. They seemed to be old hands at this sort of thing. "I must warn you it’s a bad show, out in the limbo.”

  "Where did they go?” Mike asked again.

  On a map the Britisher traced the route into the dotted outline of the Hamun depression, below sea level, where the frontiers of Iran, Baluchistan and Afghanistan met. Into the limbo around the Hamun where outlaw tribes of all three countries refuged. Where other refugees swarmed out of Soviet territory and criminals escaped across frontiers. And police stayed away because Kurdish tribesmen would kill them for their rifles. "You have been warned,” said the British officer.

  Wiping the sweat from his tired eyes, the Finn studied the map, inch by inch.

  The officer watched him, whispering to Steve, "Is he mad?”

  "No, said Steve, who had to account for Mike; "only a new ECA mining specialist, looking for sulphur deposits—fresh out of New York.”

  The Britisher laughed. "Oh, I see. The Yankee thinks he can charter a taxi into the Hamun.”

  By moonrise Mike was in the jeep that he had bought for cash. The back of the jeep he had stocked with extra tins of gas and oil, and some canned food.

  He told Steve, "Wait up for baby.”

  "I will,” said Steve. "Don’t be late at the movies.”

  The Britisher thought they were two crazy Yankees.

  Mike didn’t sleep any that night. He wound his watch and drove on. Up the tunnel of light made by his headlights he followed the fresh wheel tracks over hard clay when the road ended.

  East by northeast he went, fast. He knew his bearing by the loom of the distant mountain on his left against the bend of the Great Bear in the sky—the mountain that was the Kuh-i-Malik Siah on the map—the Mountain of the White King, the Britisher had called it.

  When dawn flamed on his right, the stone peak of the White King flashed out like a juke box, sparkling with mica. Over the shoulders of the White King, Mike twisted the jeep until the after-dawn heat struck him. Then he stopped to put on the sunglasses Steve had given him and to drink a little. In doing so, he sighted the Hamun far ahead and beneath him. It gleamed white along
the sky line. His geologist’s eye identified it as the basin of a dried-up river, white with salt encrustations and sand.

  He saw something more. Sheep drifted on the bare slope above him, and figures seemed to run down toward him.

  "Don’t stop for long,” Steve had warned him. "You’ll be watched all the way by the tribes.”

  Starting the jeep again, Mike heard the air crack near him, and saw sand spurt up along a line to the side. A bullet fired after him. So this empty desert was populated. Under his arm in a holster he carried Steve’s .45 automatic. "Don’t show it unless you have to use it, because it’s worth more than gold or your life to the people around the Hamun.”

  When the heat haze closed in around him at noon, he lost the tire tracks he’d been following or the wind had blurred them with sand drift. Shutting his aching eyes against the dust particles, Mike felt the car bang down into a gully. Climbing out to haul loose boulders from the path of the jeep, he found he could not touch the stones with his bare hands. Using his coat for a protective pad, he cleared a way out of the gully.

  Even under the canvas top of the jeep, the furnace glow of the gully sucked away his strength. The white sand turned blood-red. Mike remembered to take a spoonful of salt in his mouth and wash it down with water from a porous jar, as the Englishman had advised, to stop dehydration.

  After that, with the wind on his face again, he felt better. It crossed his mind that he had lost the track, but could find his way back around the mountain. Instead, he found his way down from the rim into the seared bed of the Hamun.

  With the haze hanging around him like a curtain, visibility ended at a few yards. Remembering the map and the description in Razin’s book, he figured that the Russians must have gone north up the bed of the vanished river, if they were looking for the ruins of their city. So he turned into the wind, hoping it was steady from the north, swinging the jeep between treacherous sand hollows and outcroppings of rock. And he found the tracks again.

  When the sun burned through, low on the western rim of the basin, that blessed wind cleared the haze. Mike simply didn’t believe what he saw ahead of him. He was bowling along a kind of road of lava slabs. Irrigation ditches flashed past at the side. Then the empty skeletons of buildings. Ahead, a fine stone archway like a Roman arch spanned the lava causeway. It still stood there when Mike stopped beneath it. He’d never seen a mirage stand still and wait for him like this before. So he got out and felt the stones, and found they were eroded travertine, browned by the sun.

  He thought how this arch might have been built by people when water ran in the Hamun River and snow capped the summit of the White King. And how this stonework might have stood for a thousand years, barring earthquakes and human demolishers. But what people had built it, and why?

  Mike went on in the jeep. At an upstanding obelisk he turned right into a huge empty square with fine marble porticoes all around. This was the civic center, Mike decided, of the ghost city.

  Then he closed his eyes and looked again. Right in front of the biggest stairway stood a dust-coated car and two trucks with their loads roped down. Parking the jeep beside them, Mike limped up the eroded marble stairway. At the top he almost walked into a heavy machine gun mounted on a tripod. By it on an ammunition box sat a stocky man with square shoulders, watching him.

  " Hiyah,” said Mike in good American. "Hot day, isn’t it?”

  He still felt as if he were walking through a mirage that might fade out and leave him alone in the desert. But the sun was really setting behind the conglomerate cliff of the Hamun, and he walked on into a roofless hall where a dry fountain stood among marble columns, like the one in the Metropolitan Museum.

  Five men lay stripped to the waist in the shadow of the pillared wall. Three were swarthy Orientals. The tallest of the five got up and came out to Mike. With his hard muscles and close-clipped black hair he looked like a statue until he chewed on the lemon in his hand and showed a set of stainless-steel front teeth. Mike felt a tightness inside him, an old feeling of ten years before, when he had spoken with Soviet officers.

  But the other answered in hesitating English when Mike greeted him. "You are American?”

  "For sure, brother,” agreed Mike. He decided quickly not to let on that he understood Russian. And he explained that he was a mining specialist who had lost his way crossing the Hamun.

  In his turn, the tall man said he was Kavtaraz, field director of the Tiflis Ethnological Institute, on his way to Kandahar.

  "Did you meet any Sakari Kurds?” He studied Mike over his lemon.

  Mike thought of the rifle shot. "Only some sheep,” he explained, and played his part of Yankee ignoramus, asking what these ruins were doing in the desert.

  "This is the kalah—the palace of some great king.” Kavtaraz was still staring at Mike’s shirt and shoes. "Perhaps Professor Razin knows.”

  He motioned Mike to follow, and led the way down a rubble-filled corridor to another chamber. There a slender, stooped man knelt, pressing a long sheet of paper against the stones of the wall that had been carved with inscriptions in strange lettering.

  "He does not speak English,” said Kavtaraz.

  Intent on his work, the man hardly looked at them. With his white hair and thin, wasted face, he seemed to Mike to be old enough to be the real Sergei Razin. When he drew the paper from the stone, he gave a cry of excitement. An inscription showed clearly in the charcoal rubbed on the paper.

  "What is that?” Kavtaraz asked curiously in Russian.

  "An invocation in Greek. A prayer that the gods will protect this city.”

  "It looked like Russian writing.”

  "Fifteen centuries old?” The man called Razin laughed excitedly. "It was written before Russian was ever spoken! Before Moskva had a name!” Abruptly he stopped, as if frightened. Kavtaraz had said nothing, but did not seem to be pleased. Turning to his work again, as if fearful of losing a minute, the old archaeologist muttered that he had found other inscriptions in old Persian and Sanskrit, all of them religious. Many different people, he thought, had come out to this hidden city. They had brought their religious faiths with them.

  "You have a devil in you, Sergei Razin!” broke in Kavtaraz. "Who ever heard of a metropolis of religions? That’s for the fairy tales. You’d make better use of your time finding out what king or empire ruled this valley of yours.”

  "There is no sign of one.”

  Again Kavtaraz was silent. Suddenly gathering up his papers, the old professor began to plead. He’d had so few hours in the ruins. And he needed days to make even a surface examination.

  The director explained curtly that it was dangerous to delay in this furnace grate of a valley. Their mission was to investigate the sites farther on through Afghanistan.

  While they argued, the guard who had been at the machine gun appeared, and stood by Mike, listening. Mike found it was hard to pretend that he didn’t understand what the others were saying. Every word was important to him in sizing up this Razin.

  Then the guard told Kavtaraz he had sighted fires above them, and thought the fires must be for cooking food. Involuntarily, Mike glanced at the rim of the Hamun. One by one, he observed specks of red light in the shadow of the conglomerate slopes.

  Studying them, Kavtaraz said, "Well, then, Grishka, we have visitors.” Apparently ignoring Mike, he went off with the stocky guard, Grishka.

  As far as Mike could make out, they were what they seemed to be—a pair of Russian scientists with another pair of technicians and probably three drivers, on their way to do field work in Afghanistan. The machine gun set up to cover the palace steps was no more than a reasonable safeguard. And certainly the old professor had his heart in his labor as he gathered up shards of pottery into a bag and tried feverishly to clean the encrusted clay from a tiny statuette he unearthed in the fading light.

  But Mike could not be sure this was the Sergei Razin he had known. The weak, hoarse voice told him nothing. The pallid, anxious figure did no
t resemble the brilliant scientist who had lectured from the platform twenty years before.

  When the light failed, the other gazed around helplessly. Gathering up his bag and rolls of paper with the small pick and wire brush, he began to quest through the ruins. At a square marble stand he bent over to feel the carvings on the slab above it. It struck Mike as vaguely familiar, and peering at it, he identified it as an altar with the figures of a man and sheep over it.

  "Early Christian! ” cried the archaeologist, feeling the stone shapes. "The shepherd that was the sign of Christ, before the cross.”

  Mike dared not speak to him. Up to now, he fancied the others took him for what he let on to be, and one word of Russian would stir deadly suspicion against him. Mike had had experience with such suspicion.

  "Fugitives,” the old man was muttering; "refugees might cross the deserts . . . and build such altars. ... If I only had light.”

  Either they had no flashlights or would not use them in that dangerous area. Mike, straining to hear Razin's voice, was aware of a familiar mechanical voice near him. Somebody had switched on a radio. It gave Mike a surge of hope.

  To find out what the others were doing, he fumbled his way back to the hall and wandered down to his jeep. To account for his actions, he pulled a can of fruit juice and one of brown bread out of the back, wondering fleetingly if the jeep had anything in it that might look queer to the Russians. But the stuff had all come from Zahidan.

  Climbing the marble stairway again, he felt sure that the six others of the expedition were eating in the great hall or listening to the sizable radio that seemed to be tuned in to Tiflis.

  There was light, after all, because the full moon began to show over the eastern rim, brilliant in the moistureless air. By the altar Razin was taking measurements hastily and scribbling them down on his roll of paper with a pencil. It gave Mike a strange feeling—that only this old man was doing something real and important, while all the rest of them played a meaningless game of treachery.