“What is it?” Halvorsen asks.
Jane Sparmann, at Ibrahim’s elbow, cups her hand and calls, “It’s full of coins! Athenian owls, some Corinthians, something from Syracuse.”
“Fine,” Halvorsen says, without enthusiasm. “Give him his bonus.”
“You don’t want to see them?”
“Later,” he says.
They always pay the diggers extra for any easily marketable artifacts, to keep them from taking them on their own behalf. The expense is trivial, a hundred lire per coin. Sparmann is excited by the find—she’s still young—but to Halvorsen the coins, and indeed the whole Greek settlement, are merely an irritating distraction. Dozens of Greek coins turn up wherever you put a spade in the ground. As for the stumps of a little temple, the hazy outlines of a marketplace: who cares? The Mediterranean world is full of Greek temples. They bring no news. Halvorsen is looking beneath such things, beyond, behind, searching for the secret from which all this Mediterranean splendor sprang. The unknown progenitor-race, the pivot, the fulcrum on which the magnificence turned as it began the centrifugal outreach of its grandeur.
He returns to his digging.
But almost immediately comes another booming cry from Ibrahim: “Paydos! Paydos!” Time to quit for the lunch-break.
Halvorsen would just as soon go on working while the others knock off. That would be bad form, though: you mustn’t let your workmen think you’re lazy, but it’s not good to seem maniacally compulsive, either. He hobbles down the hill and over to the workshed, where the usual meal of olives, eggs, canned tuna fish, and warm beer is being dispensed.
“How’d things go, Dr. H?” Sparmann asks. She smiles pleasantly—she’s very pretty, actually, though Halvorsen would never dream of laying a hand on her—but her subtext is fundamentally malevolent. She knows damned well how it has gone up there, how it goes all the time. But she is politely maintaining the pretense that he may eventually find something on the hill.
“Starting to look promising,” Halvorsen says. Why not? Hope costs nothing.
This season’s dig has four weeks to go. And then? Will he spend the off season, as usual, raising money for next year’s work, the grant applications, the lecture series, the endless begging among the well-heeled? Not to mention the interminable business of renewing the digging permit, a hassle that was always complicated in unpredictable ways by the twists and turns of Turkish politics. How much easier it would be simply to give up, retire from field work, write some books, find a soft curatorship or chairmanship somewhere. But that would be an admission of defeat. It had been a calculated risk to propose his theory as openly as he had; if the notion had come from a forty-year-old, the eventual failure to produce substantiation would be accepted by his colleagues simply as a case of a young man’s reach exceeding his grasp, but at Halvorsen’s age any such failure would be an irrevocable mark of decline, even senility, a regrettable third act to such a brilliant career. He didn’t dare abandon his field work. He was condemned by his own insistent hypothesis to stay out here under this glazed blue sky until he found what he was looking for, or else die trying.
“Beer?” someone asks him.
“Please,” says Halvorsen, taking the bottle, though he knows that it will be weary, stale, flat, unprofitable. No surprises there. It is Efes Pilsen, the terrible Turkish beer. Halvorsen would have preferred a Carlsberg; but Copenhagen is a long way away. So he guzzles it, wincing a little, and even has a second one. Warm and weary, yes. Stale. Flat. And definitely unprofitable.
The nights are always strangely cool here, even in summer, with a sharp autumnal edge on them, as though the sun’s intense heat has burned a hole in the atmosphere by day and the place is as airless as the moon after dark. Halvorsen sits apart from the others, reads, broods, sips raki, soaks his sore leg. The archaeologists’ compound consists of two whitewashed cinderblock storage buildings, a work-shed, and six little tents down by the sandy beach where they sleep. Most of the Turkish workmen make their camps for the night on the shallow slopes just back of the dig, covering themselves with leafy branches or threadbare blankets, though some go home on donkeyback to their village five or six miles up the road.
Halvorsen’s assistants—two women, three men, this year—sit outside their tents, waiting for him to go inside and fall asleep. During the season they have coupled off in various spasmodic patterns, as usual, but they try to hide that from him as though he were some sort of chaperone for them. For most of the summer, Halvorsen is aware, Jane Sparmann has been sharing the tent of Bruce Feld of the University of Pennsylvania, and the Chicago girl, Elaine Harris, has been shifting her affections between Martin Altman of Michigan State and the other boy—Riley, O’Reilly, Halvorsen can never remember which—from that university in Ohio. Let them have their fun, Halvorsen thinks: what they do at night is no business of his. But still they wait for him; and at last, though he isn’t sleepy yet, he rises and waves goodnight and limps into his tent.
His body aches, his mind is terribly alert. He stretches out on his cot and prays in the clammy darkness for sleep to take him.
Instead the night-voice, that insinuating, tickling voice in his head that has been so insistently frequent of late, comes to him again and says:
—Here. I want you to see this. This is the Palace of the Triple Queen.
Every word is perfectly distinct. He has never heard the voice with such clarity before.
And this time the words are followed by an image. Halvorsen beholds on the screen of his mind the facade of a many-columned three-terraced structure that might almost be Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir al-Bahri, except that the colonnades fold back upon themselves in topologically implausible ways, as if they were pivoting into some adjacent dimension, and the glowing bas-reliefs along the pediment are utterly alien in style, a procession of slender angular figures interlocking and bending out of focus in the same incomprehensible twisting way. Behind the columns of the topmost terrace lurks some filmy, shadow-cloaked being, barely perceptible except as huge eyes and a ripple of shimmering light, whose frail silvery form nevertheless emanates immense strength and power.
“Who are you?” Halvorsen asks. “What do you want with me?”
—And this, this is the courtyard of the Tribunal of the People in the time of the Second Mandala.
Halvorsen sees a sort of marble beehive, fifty or sixty hexagonal tanks out of each of which rises the face of a huge-eyed hairless figure, more or less human in general outline. They are submerged from their shoulders down in a radiant luminous fluid. Halvorsen is given to understand that these creatures are a single entity in fifty bodies, that in their own era they exerted some kind of high governmental function, that they spent lifetimes of unimaginable length standing in these six-sided pools of nutrients.
—And what I show you now, says the voice, are the ruins of the building known as the Concord of Worlds, which also is of the time of the Second Mandala, and above it the outlying precincts of the City of Brass, constructed thirty cycles later.
Scenes of confused splendor flood his mind. Marble pillars, shining metal slabs inscribed in unknown languages, obelisks of chalcedony, all strewn about as though by a giant’s hand; and, overlying them with a casual disdain, the streets of some rigidly geometrical later city, gleaming with a cruel metallic sheen.
“This is madness,” Halvorsen mutters. He sits up, gropes in the darkness for his sleeping-pills. “Leave me alone, will you? Get out of my mind.”
—I mean no harm.
“Tell me who you are, then.”
—A friend. A colleague.
“I want to know your name.”
—It would mean nothing to you.
This is a new development, actually to be holding a conversation of sorts with this phantom: with himself, to be more accurate. It seems to mark a dismaying advance in his mental deterioration and he finds it terrifying. Halvorsen begins to tremble.
“What do you want with me?” he demands. Shouting out
loud, now. Careful, he thinks. The others will hear you and come running, and the secret will be out. Poor old coot has lost his mind. He will beg them to cover it up, and they will promise, but of course gossip travels so quickly in academic circles—
—I want to offer you—to offer you—
Sputter. Hiss. Static on the line. Then silence.
“Come on, damn you, finish your sentence!”
Nothing. Nothing. Halvorsen feels like weeping. He finds a pill. Looks for the water pitcher, finds the raki bottle instead. What the hell. He washes the pill down with a shot of straight raki. Getting suicidal now? he asks himself. The Turkish whiskey burns his throat. Almost at once he feels groggy. He wonders, as the drug and the raki hit him simultaneously, whether he will live to see morning.
But of course he does. After breakfast everyone assembles, Jane Sparmann calls the roll of workmen, a new day’s toil begins. Sweat, dust, sunscreen, bug repellent. And the tools of the trade: picks, shovels, sifting screens, brushes, tape-measures, envelopes, tags, dust-goggles, sketch-pads, cameras. Jane continues to work in the Greek-era trench; Bruce and Martin will be photographing the Minoan level, this season’s central focus, which now has begun to emerge from its overburden; the other two have projects of their own in the Byzantine strata. And Halvorsen painfully ascends the hill for another attempt at unearthing some trace of his long-sought prehistoric civilization.
Business as usual, yes. Another day under the dazzling sun. That fierce light bleaches all color out of everything. Nor is there much in the way of sound: even the surf makes merely a faint snuffling noise here. Two dark puffs of dust to the east are the only blemishes on the brilliant dome of the sky. A stork appears from somewhere and hovers for a long while, wings scarcely moving, surveying the busy archaeologists skeptically from aloft.
Halvorsen, down on his knees, nose to the ground, reaches the end of the brick wall, jabs a probing-fork into the soil, feels the change in texture. It was around here somewhere that the handful of scraggly, badly eroded artifacts of apparent Neolithic origin that had lured him into this project in the first place had been exposed by the storm: a crude bull’s-head in baked clay, a fragment of a double-axe amulet of distinctly un-Minoan style, a painted snippet of what he is convinced was a mother-goddess amulet. Year after year he has cut his way toward this point—delayed for two whole seasons by the discovery of the Hittite wall—and now, almost afraid of the answers he is about to get, he is ready to strike downward into the hill to see what lies five or ten meters beneath the surface. He will need the workmen to do that for him, he realizes. But he will be over them like a hawk, watching every shovelful they lift.
This afternoon—maybe tomorrow—
An unexpected interruption comes just then. From the east, a throbbing sputtering sound, a cloud of dust, a dirt bike chugging down the rough little road that leads to the site. The workmen wave at him from below, calling out, “Müdür Bey! Müdür Bey!” A messenger has arrived, bringing him a letter from Ankara. Perturbed, Halvorsen makes his way uneasily down from his hilltop. The envelope, soiled and creased, bears the insignia of the Ministry of Education. His fingers quiver a little as he opens it: the Department of Antiquities of the Ministry of Education has jurisdiction over all archaeological digs. Some change must have occurred; and in Turkey all change involving the bureaucracy is change for the worse.
There’s been a change, yes. But perhaps not a problem. Halvorsen scans the letter, purple typescript on manila stock, translating quickly. Hikmet Aytul, the Department of Antiquities official who has charge of all archaeological work in this part of the country—Hikmet Pasha, Halvorsen calls him, because he is so vast and self-important—has resigned. The new superintendent of excavations is a certain Selim Erbek, an assistant curator of a provincial museum further north along the coast. He is making the rounds of his new responsibilities and intends to pay a visit to Halvorsen’s dig in the next two or three days.
“Trouble?” Bruce Feld asks.
Halvorsen shrugs. “I’m not sure. Bureaucratic reshuffling. Hikmet Pasha’s out, somebody named Selim Erbek’s in. He’ll be dropping in to get acquainted with us later in the week.”
“Should we take any special action?” Jane Sparmann wants to know.
“You mean, hide yesterday’s coins?” Halvorsen laughs. “No, no, we play by the rules here. When Selim Bey gets here, we show him everything we’ve found. Such as it is.” He has already debated, briefly and silently, whether he ought to get started on his own penetration of the hill before the new man arrives. Significant finds might produce unpredictable reactions; it might be wiser to take a reading on this Selim Erbek before plunging in. But Halvorsen rejects the idea. He is here to dig and, if possible, find. No sense wasting time trying to outguess the inscrutable bureaucrats.
After lunch he picks Ibrahim, Ayhan, and Zeki as his workmen and finally begins peeling back the hill, after years of anticipation. Halvorsen has worked with these three men over many seasons and trusts them totally, though he watches them closely all the same. They dig carefully and well, using their picks with surgical delicacy, running their fingers through the clods of earth in search of tiny overlooked artifacts before letting the wheelbarrow man carry the sifted dirt away. But there is nothing to find. This part of the hill, despite the fact that a few anomalous artifacts had been found in one corner of it after that monster storm, seems in general never to have felt the imprint of human use. Wherever you dig, around this site, you turn up something, be it Turkish, Byzantine, Greek, Roman, Minoan, whatever. Except here. Halvorsen has magically located the one corner of the place that nobody in the last ten thousand years has seen fit to occupy. It is the utter opposite of his expectations.
Still, there’s always tomorrow.
“Paydos! Paydos!” comes the call, finally, at dusk. Another day gone, less than nothing to show for it.
Lying in the darkness of his tent, Halvorsen waits for the voice to come, and soon enough it is with him.
—I will show you more, if you allow it.
“Go on. Anything you like.”
Halvorsen strives to be calm. He wants to attain numbness in the face of this absurdity. He knows that he must accept the fact of his own unfolding insanity the way he accepts the fact that his left leg will never function properly again.
—These are the ruins of Costa Stambool.
Into Halvorsen’s mind springs the horrific sight of vast destruction seen at a great distance, an enormous field of horror, a barren and gritty tumble of dreary gray fragments and drab threadbare shards that would make a trash-midden look like a meadow, and all of it strewn incoherently about in a willy-nilly chaotic way. He has spent his life among ruins, but this one is a ruin among ruins, the omega of omegas. Some terrible catastrophe has taken place here.
But then the focus shifts. He is able to see the zone of devastation at closer range, and suddenly it appears far from hideous. Even at its perimeter, flickers of magic and wonder dance over the porous, limy soil of its surface: sprites and visitations, singing wordlessly to him of Earth’s immense history and of futures already past, drift upward from the broken edge-tilted slabs and caper temptingly about him. A shimmer of delicate golden green iridescence that had not been visible a moment ago rises above everything and surrounds it.
—This was the City of Cities.
The broken shards are coming to life. The city of Costa Stambool begins to rise into view like a whale breaching the surface of the sea, or like a vast subterranean tower emerging from its hiding-place in the bowels of the earth. It is an irresistible force as it heaves itself out of the rubble and climbs with a roaring rush to a height Halvorsen can barely calculate.
It is less a city than a single enormous building, incredibly massive at its base and tapering to a narrow, impossibly lofty summit; and it is skinless, wholly without walls, its exterior peeled away on all sides to reveal the layered intricacies of its teeming core. Halvorsen can see a myriad inhabitants moving abo
ut within, following the patterns of their daily lives from level to level, from street to street, from room to room.
Bizarrely, the building seems to be standing on edge, its floors at right angles to the ground. But how can that be? It makes no sense. Then Halvorsen realizes that he is being granted a double perspective: somehow he is able to see the interior of the great structure from the side and top at once, a four-dimensional view, piercing downward and upward and backward and forward through the thousands or perhaps even millions of years of the city’s existence. That puts him at ease. He understands how one reads the multifarious layers of a long-occupied site.
The voice in his mind guides him along.
—The walls you see down there, glowing with scarlet phosphorescence, are the oldest levels. On top of these are the structures of the Second Mandala, and then the Third. Here you will recognize the Concord of Worlds and the City of Brass. This is Glissade, the pleasure-city of the Later Third. Here is the palace of the Triple Queen; here, the courtyard of the Emperor of All; down here, the cells of the Tribunal of the People.
Everything is as perfect as the day it was built; and yet simultaneously every layer reveals signs of the destruction wrought by builders of later eras, and over everything else are the brutal marks of some climactic onslaught of vandals: the work, Halvorsen is told, of the bestial invaders who at the dawn of the climactic Fourth Mandala brought fire and death to this place.
In awe Halvorsen tours the temples of unknown gods and the palaces of dynasties yet unborn but already forgotten. He stares at a vast marble slab proclaiming some empire’s grandeur in an incomprehensible script. He enters the Library of Old Stambool, and sees iron-bound chests overflowing with what he understands to be books, though they look more like rubies and emeralds. The guiding voice never ceases, identifying for him the Market of All Wonders, the Gymnasium, the Field of Combat, the Tower of the Winds.
Hot Times in Magma City, 1990-95 Page 29
