I was asleep before sunrise, but roused almost immediately it seemed by Jules, newly shaved, silk-shirted, dressed in riding breeches and polished boots.
‘But Jules,’ I grumbled at him, ‘there will be no pretty girls in Khorassim, no civic reception of any kind. Why do you make yourself so beautiful?’
‘It is an occasion,’ he said, ‘and I like to dress up for occasions. Come to think of it, this is almost a unique occasion.’
‘I don’t suppose Monsell shaved and polished his boots before visiting the ruins,’ I said.
‘Ah, but then you see, Pierre, he came here by accident. We didn’t. It makes all the difference. And he didn’t shave because he wore a big beard anyway, as was no doubt fashionable among the archaeologists of his day. Now on the second expedition I’m sure he dressed most carefully before taking over his city.’
‘If he ever got here,’ I said. ‘How do you know he came again?’
‘Abdullah brought me this. One of the Arabs found it in a cleft of rock a little way down the defile.’
I took the object Jules handed me and examined it. It was an old briar pipe with a well-bitten amber mouthpiece secured by a tarnished silver band, on which one could make out the initials ‘E. M.’ engraved in Gothic letters.
‘Edward Monsell’s!’ I exclaimed. ‘But, Jules, he may have dropped it here on his first visit.’
‘Perhaps. It doesn’t prove anything, I know. But I like to think his descendants may still be inhabiting the city. It would be so like Monsell to try and strike life from old stones, to set up an antiquarian’s kingdom in the desert. Imagine it, Pierre, an Achaean kingdom ready-made in this valley; and some fabulous blonde Helen waiting for her demon lover.’
‘There were no women,’ I said, ‘in Monsell’s expedition.’
‘Oh, he would have picked them up on the way. He was a Rider Haggard character, that Monsell, if ever there was one. You may be sure he found a “She” en route. . . .’
‘Jules,’ I remarked, ‘you are sex-starved and incorrigible. If we find any woman in that city she will be of stone.’
He shrugged. ‘Aren’t they all? I fancy you mean though like the Venus of Milo, without arms to resist our charms? Well, my dear Pierre, I have shaved and made myself presentable for my first date with the great-grand-daughter of Edward Monsell and that not impossible “She”. Believe me, one glance from her clear blue Anglo-Saxon eyes, and I shall be for all time her devoted helot.’
‘Her designing Paris, you mean,’ I suggested, ‘who will carry her off from the Menelaus-in-occupation to Paris, to the Louvre. We shall set your Helen of Khorassim on a pedestal beside the Venus of Milo. What a Trojan War might result among the aesthetes!’
‘Well, hurry up! You needn’t shave, if you don’t want to. I simply must arrive at Monsell’s Acropolis before the sun gets up and my shirt gets sweaty. Breakfast’s ready.’
In his book Monsell has written:
The Acropolis of Khorassim, once undoubtedly approached by long flights of steps (now a regular acclivity of sand), has its back to the mighty southern cliff which shuts in the valley. Here the level sand indicates that formerly a great square spread out before the rock temple or tomb which I have already described as both architecturally and literally the master-work of the citadel. Perhaps in that temple-mausoleum there rests the last of the kings of Khorassim. The huge doorway is blocked with mortared stone, but individual stones have crumbled and fallen, leaving here and there gaps of considerable dimension through which I might if I wished have crawled. I had no lamp, and as it was important in my solitary circumstance to conserve my few matches, I did not make the attempt. But this royal mausoleum will be my first point of enquiry when I return with a fittingly equipped party to investigate the secrets of Khorassim.
Jules and I had decided that the Acropolis and the rock temple that dominated it should be our own ‘first point of enquiry’ too. It was then towards the great southern bluff of that blind valley that we took our way through the sand-inundated city, among the bleached-bone columns we had looked down on the previous night, past temples swallowed to the very roof line in the desert’s drift, across great formless dunes that concealed who knew what architectural splendours buried there like toys in a bran-tub. The cliff towered closer as ridge succeeded dip in the ever-undulating valley; until toiling at last up Monsell’s ‘regular acclivity of sand’ we came to the Acropolis.
Here was the open level space, with the escarpment shutting out the sky in front of us, and demonic and immense as if its pillars supported the entire red universe above it the Doric façade of the rock-temple or mausoleum. In that first view of it I knew that all the desolation that engulfed the valley came from that one source. Evil seemed to blow like a cold wind out of it over the wide empty square. Perhaps Jules sensed it too, for he said, as if he wished to divert my attention from its one compelling focal point and in tones less exuberant than his wont:
‘The sand is not so deep here, as below. Look, Pierre, this square must once have been lined with statues.’ He pointed to where a white marble arm, upflung as though to ward off a blow, was lifted above the sand’s surface. As we looked about us we noticed other projections in the sand; and turning aside to examine one of these we found it to be the white stone head of a young woman facing in the direction of the temple. The expression the sculptor had given her was unpleasing: the fixed dilated eyes, the lips drawn back from the gums as if she screamed to all eternity, made her the image of panic terror in its ancient sense (the fear not of death but of deathless evil—the element from which most of religion and all magic springs).
‘Not exactly the Helen of Khorassim,’ I said, and I felt my back gooseflesh as I stooped to touch the elaborately tired and cunningly dishevelled stone ringlets, ‘yet in its way a masterpiece. But surely, Jules, the Baroque rather than the Greek: Bernini, not Praxiteles?’
He was not listening. ‘Some nymph awaiting Olympian rape,’ he said, but sadly. ‘Europa? Leda? Syrinx? We’ll see when we dig her out. Let us go on.’
My eyes were drawn again to the rock tomb now less than two hundred yards from us. The massive fluted columns carved out of the sheer red sandstone upheld a pediment whose oblique angle roofed a group of statuary. This consisted of three robed female figures, two seated, one recumbent and headless, her left arm flung out into the acute angle at the western foot of the pediment: in the eastern angle a nude male figure fled away on winged heels, his cloak blown out behind him and one crooked arm clutching an object too clumsy to be lyre or caduceus.
‘The Three Fates?’ Jules queried, in the tone one uses in an empty church.
‘Perseus and the Gorgons,’ I corrected him, ‘without a doubt. You see that man running off on the left? Can’t you identify what he’s carrying? Here, take my binoculars.’
He put them to his eyes and adjusted them. ‘A basket . . .’ he hesitated before adding, ‘a kind of bag of . . . of serpents.’
‘It’s the Medusa’s head in the sack, Jules. The snakes—well, descipitation has disarranged her hair-do. . . . It’s funny,’ I went on, ‘that Monsell doesn’t describe those sculptures: he mentions the Doric columns and the pediment, yes—but not a word about the figures. Possibly he was being cagey about details until he could bring a camera along to confirm them, but that’s unlike him. More probably when he came to write of those creatures his pen dried up. They’re rather a gruesome form of life-in-death, aren’t they?’
But Jules had lowered the binoculars and focussed them on the doorway in the deep shadow under the great arch.
‘By God,’ he cried, ‘Monsell made it! He got in! Look, Pierre, a passage has been forced through the stones sealing the door of the temple.’ His excitement rebounded from the cliff in a small avalanche of echoes.
I could make out a dark oblong in the right bottom corner of the blocked entrance. Very small it seemed in that colossal portico; but when I had snatched back my field-glasses from Jules and trained them on the
spot I could see that a rectangular gap at least seven feet high and four across had been hewn in the wall which sealed off entry to the mausoleum, and piled in orderly fashion each side of the gap were the stones that had been removed to make it.
‘Well, let’s go and see where he got to,’ said Jules, ‘there’s nothing to stop us.’
‘Would it not be better to wait for the Arabs to come up with us? We shall need lanterns inside; picks perhaps, and scaling ropes.’
‘I have a torch. Come on, Pierre. We can at least look inside.’
I have led patrols in the Cambodian forests and among the scrub-covered Algerian hills, but I have never in my life been more afraid than in following Jules those few hundred yards across the level sands and into the shadow of that red Doric archway. On patrol in enemy territory one fears an ambush, but nine times out of ten one returns without a shot fired. Here I knew for a certainty that the Enemy, that Evil ageless and personified waited in strength to take us.
Darkness like a curtain of black velvet lay beyond the gap. Jules shone his torch within: the light revealed another wall, a wall of red sandstone this time two paces on through the gap.
‘Jules,’ I cried, ‘the Arabs are coming up. We shall need tools to break down the second wall.’
‘Nonsense!’ he said. ‘It’s a passageway. We turn sharply to the left when we’re through Monsell’s hole. Come on, Pierre!’
I stumbled after him down the narrow passage. Occasionally he flung his torch ray upwards: the ceiling seemed to grow higher as we advanced, or perhaps as we descended. We came after some minutes to a spot where the passage branched in three directions.
‘It’s a positive labyrinth,’ I said. ‘Should we not go back for the others? We need lanterns properly to explore this place.’
‘We’ll take the left passage,’ said Jules, ‘and if it turns out too complex a maze we’ll turn back, and set out once more with a work party.’
Now we seemed to be ascending in a long serpentine curve. I began to count our paces. There were nine hundred and eleven before we saw the light ahead of us. It was a dazzling radiance, exploding from the left side of the passage.
‘You see,’ Jules whispered, ‘there are inhabitants. . . .’ Suddenly he called out, ‘Is anyone there?’
‘We are all here, effendi, awaiting your orders.’ The voice was that of our dragoman, Abdullah. We had made full circle and come again to the gap through which we had entered. I laughed until my eyes were wet. We had returned to base and the Enemy had held his fire. I was enormously relieved, but poor Jules did not relish anti-climax. He was very much on his dignity. He gave orders for a party of seven to be got ready immediately: lanterns, picks, and spades, a scaling ladder, and some sticks of chalk.
Our Arabs stood in an uneasy group beyond the portico, staring about them over the wide square of the Acropolis, craning their necks to look up at the towering escarpment that shut it in, and speaking little. But when Abdullah began to relay Jules’s orders a most melancholy jabbering broke out among them, discordant and shrill as the calls of disturbed seafowl, which indeed in their white and black robes these men not a little resembled.
‘Offer the volunteers the usual backsheesh, Abdullah,’ cried Jules, ‘but don’t let them fight over it.’ Our overseer checked the harsh harangue on which he was launched and spoke mellifluously of gold and great treasure to be found within the tomb, but still only two or three men stood forward from the group. His voice grew strident again and a sullen two men more came forward to stand beside the first volunteers. ‘Dogs!’ shouted Abdullah at the rest. ‘Cowardly dogs, to shrink at your own shadows. . . .’ He shook that bunch of frightened men, as a man might shake an apple tree, until a seventh had dropped out as it were on to the sand. I understood perfectly their reluctance: I knew how it felt.
Bundles were untied and the appropriate tools issued, while I leaned against the plinth of one of the soaring columns and mechanically filled myself a pipe of tobacco. It was only when I drew on it, and my teeth and tongue were gritted with sand, that I realised I had put Monsell’s briar into my mouth. I felt a dreadful sense of nausea. I can’t explain it. In time of war one is not fastidious about the belongings of the recent dead. As I spat out those grains of sand I seemed to be looking over the very edge of the precipice that separates time from Timelessness: almost I saw at the foot of that vast gulf the shape of the Enemy that menaced us. Another second and I should perhaps have been wholly aware, but Jules spoke and the impression was gone.
‘Are you ill, Pierre? You’re looking ghastly.’
‘I swallowed a fly,’ I lied. ‘I’m all right.’
‘Good. The men are all ready. Abdullah will chalk our route.’
He stepped into the gap and disappeared, and defiantly I stuck Monsell’s pipe between my teeth again and followed. ‘We’ll take the right prong of the fork this time,’ said Jules, as we set out along that narrow tunnel, ‘and see where it leads us.’
It led us into a vast pillared cavern where our voices boomed forlornly back at us from the hollows of the roof. The Arabs’ lanterns revealed the girth of the nearer columns but little more, and the beams of our own torches probed but feebly the darkness that overhung us. We moved forward slowly through the cathedral-like immensity of this chamber, and our torches fell on another doorway, blocked like the outer entrance with mortared stone and resembling it too in having an oblong of darkness at its foot.
‘Monsell’s signature again!’ said Jules, flashing his torch beam on the gap and the pile of stones beside it. ‘He has found his way into the tomb itself.’
‘Tomb, or shrine, or Unholy of Unholies,’ I said. ‘Yes, Monsell or others have been here before us.’
Something flapped high up in the roof and we shone our torches up to see what it might be, but could make out nothing.
‘Owls or bats?’ said Jules; and forcing a jest, ‘I said the place would be inhabited.’
‘You didn’t have to tell me,’ I said. ‘I knew already.’
A low roofed passage led beyond the second gap, a passage that twisted like a dying snake. Once we came on the life-size statue of a naked man that lay face downward in the dust, cast down perhaps from one of the niches or tunnel mouths blocked with piled stone we had passed at several of the bends in this passage. We tried to turn it over but it was too heavy for us.
Now the roof of the passage grew somewhat higher, and its walls bellied outwards in a peculiar sloping curve that put me in mind of the head of a viper where it joins the body; and here again our progress was delayed by another wall. It had been begun as a wall at least, but only a few feet had been completed: on top balks of timber, a jumble of stones, and broken statuary had been piled to form a barricade, but a section of this rough barrier had been pulled aside and a third gap cleared by those who had been there before us. Under the debris we could discern dimly two kneeling statues at the base of the wall: they appeared to represent masons at work on the mortaring. We could not make out their faces, for they were turned to the barrier. Something in their attitude, though, made me think they were by the same sculptor whose work we had already seen in the Acropolis.
‘It looks,’ said Jules, ‘as if whoever was building this wall abandoned it in an almighty hurry. Were they walling up prisoners alive in here, and did they break free?’
‘There is no sign of fighting, Jules. And if it was Monsell’s party . . .’
‘No—that’s Monsell,’ said Jules, pointing to the gap, ‘through there.’
There was shouting behind us in the passage: Abdullah was encouraging his men. When they came up there were two Arabs with lanterns, and Abdullah: no more. ‘The other dogs remained behind in the great temple,’ Abdullah explained. ‘Neither persuasion nor blows would urge them further. Moreover these two rats would have slipped away if the passage had been wider and I not behind them to persuade them forward with my foot and pistol butt. . . . Go forward there and hold up the light for the effendi. Do you not se
e they intend to scale the barricade and enter the treasure-house?’
Jules was first over the wall and I an unwilling second. The lantern beams threw our distorted shadows on the red walls and roof of the passage beyond. These narrowed again, and after a few paces Jules halted and shone his torch on some objects hanging from the tunnel ceiling. They were bats hanging head downwards as if in sleep, but they did not fly off as we came up to them. They were sculptured bats—wonderfully carved of some glossy dark grey stone. I put up a hand to touch one, and it rocked and fell heavily in the dust at our feet.
‘The metal,’ said Jules, ‘with which they were suspended from the roof is rusted. Careful, Pierre. We don’t want to bring the lot down on our heads.’
We went on but a short way when our torches lit on a pylon-shaped doorway cut in the sandstone rock. Here again an attempt had been made at a rudimentary barricade. Another statue was facing the doorway and the glooms beyond it, as if those who were raising the barricade had stood it there and then retreated before they could break it up for use as building stone.
I could see the finely carved marble back, the head tilted a little upward, and the arms bent forward so that one had the illusion that it leant its elbows on the piled masonry.
As we drew nearer I noticed peculiarities. There was a belt, for instance, buckled about the statue’s waist, and tattered wisps of dusty clothing clung to parts of the torso and the lower limbs. The sculptor had carved the legs most realistically: one could make out the calf muscles, and the veins above the ankles, but there seemed to be no feet, until I drew close enough to realise that they were encased in a pair of dusty wrinkled boots.
Where Human Pathways End Page 12
