The Palace at Midnight: The Collected Work of Robert Silverberg, Volume Five

by Robert Silverberg

  “In a minor way. In the course of my research.”

  “Everyone in California takes drugs all the time. Yes?”

  Hornkastle smiled blearily. “Not these days. Not as much as is commonly believed.”

  “The mushroom here, the Amanita muscaria,” she said, “is very strong, maybe because it is holy and this is the Holy Land. Stronger than what is in California, I believe. No wonder they call it a god. You want to try it?”

  Hazily he imagined she was offering him some right now, and he looked at her in horror and amazement. But Ben-Horin laughed and said, “He is not sure. I will take him to Kidron and he can conduct his own investigation.”

  “It is very strong,” she said again. “You must be careful.”

  “I will be careful,” Hornkastle said solemnly, although the promise sounded hollow to him, for he had been careful so long, careful to a fault, pathologically careful, and now in Israel he felt strangely reckless and terrified of his own potential recklessness. “My interest is scholarly,” he said, but it came out skhollally, and as he struggled desperately and unsuccessfully to get the word right, Ben-Horin tactfully rescued him with an apology for having an early class the next day. When they said good night Geula Ben-Horin took his hand and, Hornkastle was certain, held it just a moment too long.

  In the morning he felt surprisingly fine, almost jaunty, and at midday he set out for the Old City on foot. Entering it, he looked about in wonder. Before him lay the Via Dolorosa, Christ’s route to the Crucifixion, and to all sides spread a tangle of alleys, arcades, stairs, tunnels, passageways and bazaars. Hornkastle had been in plenty of ancient cities, but there was something about this one that put it beyond all others. He could touch a paving stone and think, King David walked here or the Emperor Titus or Saladin, and this was where Jesus had staggered to Golgotha under the weight of his own cross.

  So, then: up one winding street and down another, getting himself joyously lost—Monastery of the Flagellation, Western Wall, Dome of the Rock, Street of the Chain, a random walk, poking his nose into the souks where old hawk-faced men sold sheepskin rugs, pungent spices out of burlap bags, prayer-beads, shawls, hideous blue ceramic things, camel statuettes, unplucked chickens, sides of lamb, brass pots, hookahs, religious artifacts of every sort and, for all Hornkastle knew, merchandise far more sinister than any of that. In a noisy fly-specked market he bought some falafel and a carbonated beverage, and a little farther on, still hungry, he stopped at a place selling charcoal-grilled kebabs. The fascination of the place was like a drug. These timeless faces, men in worn serge suits who wore flowing Bedouin headdresses, young women darting from doorway to doorway, grubby children, dogs blithely licking at spilled God-knows-what in the gutters, old peasant women with refrigerators or television sets strapped to their backs, cries and odors, the periodic amplified songs of the muezzins calling the faithful to the mosques, picturesque squalor everywhere, why, it was like a movie, like time-travel even, except that it was actually happening to him: he was here and now in Old Jerusalem, capital of the world. It was exhilarating and a little intoxicating. And there was that extra little thrill, that frisson, of knowing—if he could believe Ben-Horin’s story—that the ancient religion still flourished somewhat hereabouts, that there still were those who ate of the sacred mushroom that had been the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Good and Evil, the manna of the Israelites, the hallucinogenic phallic fungus that made one like unto a god. Perhaps that boy with glittering eyes in the dark doorway, that old man leaning against the cobbled wall, that powerful fellow in the tinsmiths’ stall—secret mystics, devouring God in rites as old as Sumer, undergoing joyous metamorphoses of the spirit, ecstasies. From the Greek ekstasis, the flight of the soul from the body. “You must come to Israel,” Ben-Horin had told him last winter at that meeting in Monaco after Hornkastle had read his paper on Siberian mushroom intoxication. “The most surprising things still exist among us, a dozen kilometers from the tourist hotels, and scarcely anyone knows about them, and those that do pretend that nothing is going on.”

  At 2:00 p.m. Hornkastle emerged from the maze of the Old City at the Damascus Gate. Ben-Horin was already there. “A punctual man,” the Israeli said, turning a quick grin on and off. “You feel all right today? Good. Come with me.” He led Hornkastle back into the heart of the city. Near the Via Dolorosa he said, “Walk slowly and glance to your left. See the man at the falafel stand? He is one. A user of tigla’.”

  “Tigla’?”

  “The word is Aramaic. The mushroom. A reference to its phallic shape. Are you hungry?”

  They approached the falafel stand. The man behind the counter, presiding over basins of bubbling oil, was an Arab, about thirty, with a lean triangular face, wide jutting cheekbones tapering down toward a sharp narrow chin. Hornkastle stared at him flagrantly, peering as though he were a shaman, an oracle, a holy man. Questions boiled and raged in his mind, and he felt once again that urgent hunger, that need to surrender himself and be engulfed by a larger force.

  Ben-Florin said something curt and harsh in Arabic, and the falafel seller scooped several of the golden chick-pea balls out of the hot oil, stuffing them into envelopes of pita bread. As he handed one across to Hornkastle, his eyes—dark, faintly hyperthyroid, bloodshot—met the American’s and locked on them for a long moment, and Hornkastle flinched and looked down as he took the sandwich. Ben-Horin paid. When they walked away, Hornkastle said, “Does he know you?”

  “Of course. But I could hardly speak to him here.”

  “Because he’s an Arab and you’re a Jew?”

  “Don’t be absurd. We’re both Israeli citizens. It is because I am a professor at Hebrew University and he’s a falafel seller and this is the Old City, where I am an intruder. There are class lines here that neither he nor I should cross. Don’t believe all you hear about what an egalitarian country this is.”

  “Why did you take me to him?”

  “To show you,” said Ben-Horin, “that there are tigla’ folk right in the midst of the city. And to show him that you have my sponsorship, for they trust me, after a fashion, and now they are likely to trust you. This must all be done very, very slowly. Come now, my car is near the bus station.”

  With his usual terrifying intensity Ben-Horin circled the northeast corner of the Old City and headed south out Jericho Road toward the Kidron Valley. Quickly they left the urban area behind and entered a rough, scrubby terrain, rocky and parched. Like a tour guide Ben-Horin offered a rapid commentary. “Over there, Mount Zion, Tomb of David. There, Valley of Hinnom, where in ancient times were the high places where Baal and Moloch were worshipped. Still are, perhaps, but if it’s going on, they keep very quiet about it. And here—” dry ravines, stony fields—” Kidron. You follow the valley to its end and you are in the Dead Sea.” Hornkastle saw shepherds, a camel or two, stone huts. Ben-Horin turned off on an easterly road, poorly maintained. It was amazing how quickly the land became desert once you were a short way down from cool, hilly Jerusalem. The Israeli pointed ahead toward a scruffy village—a few dozen crude buildings clumped around a couple of tin-roofed stores, one emblazoned with a giant red COCA-COLA sign. “This is the place. We will not stop today, but I will drive slowly through.”

  The town was dusty, ramshackle, drab. Outside COCA-COLA sat a few old men in jeans, battered pea-jackets and Arab headdresses. A couple of sullen boys glowered at the car. Hornkastle heard a radio playing—was that an old Presley number wailing across the wasteland? He said, “How in God’s name did you ever get them to open up to you?”

  “A long, slow process.”

  “What was your secret?”

  Ben-Horin smiled smugly. “Science. The Arabs had begun to exhaust their traditional fungus sources. I told them other places to look. My price was entree into their rites. I pledge you, it took a long time.”

  “You’ve had the mushroom yourself?”

  “Several times. To show my good faith. I didn’t enjoy it.”


  “Too heavy for you?”

  “Heavy? Heavy?” Ben-Horin seemed puzzled by the idiom. Then he said, “The physiological effects were fascinating—the intensifying of colors and textures, the sense of the earth as a breathing organism, the effect of having music turn into flavors and shapes, all the synesthesias, the familiar psychedelic circus. But also very, very powerful, more than I had experienced elsewhere. I began to feel that there truly was a God and He was touching my consciousness. I am willing to perceive the sound of a flute as something with mottled wings, but I am not willing at the age of thirty-one to begin generating a belief in supernatural deities. And when I began to lose sight of the boundaries between God and Ben-Horin, when I began to think of myself as perhaps partaking of the nature of Jesus—” Ben-Horin shook his head. “For me this is no pastime to pursue. Let those who want to be gods, saviors, divine martyrs, whatever, eat their fill of the mushroom. I am content to study its worshipers.”

  They were well past the village, now, three or four miles into the empty desert. Hornkastle said, “Do you think this cult has simply survived since ancient times, or is it a deliberate modern revival?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “But what do you think?”

  “I said I have no idea. Do you?”

  Hornkastle shrugged. “Since the whole Near East once was honeycombed with mushroom cultists, I suppose it’s possible that one group has hung on. Especially here. I’m familiar with Allegro’s notion that Jesus himself never existed, that Jesus is just a code word for the sacred mushroom that rises from the ground, the phallic-looking son of God that is eaten and shows the way to the Godhead. And this is Jesus’ own turf, after all. But presumably these cults were all suppressed thousands of years ago.”

  “Presumably.”

  “It’s exciting to think that the belief simply went underground instead. I want to find out.”

  “With luck you will, my friend.”

  “Take me into the village?”

  “Eventually.”

  “Why not now? While we’re actually here.”

  “Your impatience will be your ruin, dear Hornkastle. We must move very slowly.”

  “If you understood how eager I—”

  “I do understand. That is why there must be no haste.”

  They rounded a bend in the road. An Israeli soldier was standing beside an overturned motorbike, signaling for help. Ben-Horin halted and there was a brief colloquy in Hebrew. Then the soldier clambered into the car, apologizing in mild, inexact English as he jammed himself next to Hornkastle and made room for his machine-gun. “We will give him a lift back to Jerusalem,” Ben-Horin explained. That put an end to any talk of sacred mushrooms.

  As they passed through the village again, Hornkastle noticed that a younger man had emerged from COCA-COLA and stood outside it, arms folded. For an eerie moment Hornkastle thought he was the falafel seller—the same face, wide cheekbones, pointed chin, bulging, brooding eyes—but of course that was unlikely; this must be a cousin, a brother. In these villages everyone has the same genes.

  “I will drop you at your hotel,” said Ben-Horin.

  Itchy, irritating frustration assailed Hornkastle. He wanted much more than this, and he did not want to wait, and if impatience would be his ruin, so be it: he was impatient. He felt irritable, volatile, explosive. With an effort he calmed himself. Ben-Horin was right: only by moving slowly would anything be accomplished. The trouble was he had moved so slowly so long, all through his tame disciplined academic life. Now those disciplines seemed to be breaking down, and he stood on the brink of strangeness, awaiting the dive.

  He said, “When will we meet again?”

  “In a few days,” Ben-Horin replied. “I must deliver a lecture in Haifa tomorrow, and then there are other responsibilities. I will call you.”

  The bartender at the hotel recognized Hornkastle and asked him if he wanted arrack again. Hornkastle nodded gloomily and studied the liquor, watching the ice-cubes turn the clear fluid cloudy. Shadows were starting to lengthen over the domes and parapets of the Old City. He was working on his third drink when two tourists came in, obviously mother and daughter, say fifty-five and thirty, good-looking long-legged golden-haired women with delicate slender faces, fragile sharp noses. British, he guessed, from the severe cut of their clothes and from their imperfect, somewhat bucked teeth. Before long he managed to draw them into conversation. British, yes, Claudia and Helena, cool and elegant and self-contained, friendly. Helena, the daughter, asked what he was drinking. “Arrack,” he said. “Anise liqueur, like the Greek ouzo, you know? The Turkish raki. Same stuff from Indonesia to Yugoslavia.” The daughter ordered one; the mother tried it and called for sherry instead.

  Before long the women were on their second drinks and he was ready for his fourth and everyone was a little flushed. There was a pleasant sexual undercurrent to the conversation now, nothing obvious, nothing forced, just there, mature and not unattractive man sitting with two mature women in strange land. Anything might happen. He was fairly certain of the glow in Helena’s eyes—that same you-need-but-ask shine that he had imagined he had seen in Geula Ben-Horin’s, but this did not seem like imagination. And even the older one had a spark of it. He allowed himself quick foolish fantasies. The mother tactfully excusing herself at the right moment; he and the daughter going off somewhere for dinner, dancing, night of exotic delights, breakfast on the veranda. Or maybe the daughter pleading a headache and disappearing, and he and Claudia—why not? She wasn’t that much older than he was. Or perhaps both of them at once, something agreeably kinky, one of those nights to treasure forever. They were widows, he learned, their husbands killed in a freak hunting accident in Scotland the previous autumn. Helena spoke matter-of-factly about it, as if being widowed at thirty was no great event. “And now,” she said, “mother and I are pilgrims in Jerusalem! We look forward so much to the Easter celebrations. Since the mishap we’ve felt the presence of God by our sides constantly, and Jesus as a living force.” Hornkastle’s dreams of a wild threesome upstairs began to fade. They had been Church of England, said Claudia, very high church indeed, but after the mishap they had turned to the Roman faith for solace, and now, in the Holy Land, they would march with other pilgrims along the Via Dolorosa, bearing the cross—

  Eventually they asked Hornkastle about himself, and he sketched it all quickly, UCLA, experimental psychology, divorce, sabbatical, hint of severe inner storms, crisis, need to get away from it all. He intended to say nothing about sacred mushrooms, but somehow that slipped out—secret cult, hallucinogens, mysterious village in the desert. His cheeks reddened. “How fascinating!” Helena cried. “Will you take us there?” He imagined what Ben-Horin would say about that. He responded vaguely, and she swept onward, bright-eyed, enthusiastic, chattering about drugs, California, mysticism. He began to think he might be able to get somewhere with her after all, and started to angle the conversation back toward dinner, but no, no, they had a prior engagement, dinner at the rectory, was that it? “We must talk again soon,” said Claudia, and off they went, and he was alone again.

  A suspended time began. He wandered by himself. One night he went down to the Old City—dark, a mysterious and threatening warren of knotted streets and sinister-looking people. He ate at a little Arab place, grilled fish and mashed chick-peas for a few shekels. Afterward he got lost in a deserted area of blank-walled houses. He thought he was being followed—footsteps in the distance, rustling sounds, whispers—but whenever he glanced back, he saw nothing but woebegone lop-eared cats. Somehow he found his way to Jaffa Gate and picked up a taxi.

  He rented a car and did standard tourist things, museums and monuments. Jerusalem, he decided, looked a little like Southern California. Not the inner city, God, no, but the environs, the dry tawny rocky hills, the vast open sky, the clusters of flat-faced condominiums and whatnot sprawling over every ridge and crest—he could almost blink and imagine himself somewhere out by Yorba Linda or Riverside. Ex
cept that in the middle of it all was the city of David and Solomon and Herod and Pilate, and the place of the cross. Had any of that really happened, he wondered? A slender bearded man lurching up the Via Dolorosa under the weight of the two massive wooden beams? What is it like to carry the cross? What is it like to hang high above the ground in the cool clear springtime air of Jerusalem, waiting for your Father to summon your spirit?

  Hornkastle prowled the Old City constantly, getting to know his way around in the maze. His path often took him past the falafel stand. When he bought sandwiches from the Arab, his hand trembled, as if the falafel-seller who had so many times devoured his own god held some awesome numinous power that instilled fear. What wonders had that man seen, what strange heights had he ascended? Hornkastle felt brutally excluded from that arcane knowledge, half as old as time, that the Arab must possess. Looking into his bloodshot eyes, Hornkastle was tempted to blurt out his questions in a rush of tell me tell me, but he did not dare, for the Arab would pretend not to speak English and Ben-Horin, when he found out, would simply disown him, and that would be the end of the quest.

  From Ben-Horin he continued to hear nothing. At last, unable to contain his impatience, Hornkastle telephoned him at home but got no answer. A call to Ben-Horin’s office involved him in a maddening sequence of university switchboard operators; half an hour of persistence got him through at last to someone in Ben-Horin’s department who said he had gone to Athens to deliver a lecture.

  “Athens? I thought Haifa!”

  “No, Athens. He will be back soon.”

  “Please tell him that Thomas Hornkastle would—” But Hornkastle was holding a dead phone. Break in service or just a hangup? He reminded himself that he was in Asia, that however shiny and modern Israel might look, the mentality here was not necessarily always Western. The idea of trying to call back, of going through all those intermediaries again, was appalling. It would be quicker to drive out there and leave a message on Ben-Horin’s desk. Shortly he was on his way, navigating grimly in his flimsy Fiat among the squadrons of Israeli kamikaze drivers. With minor confusions he reached the glossy campus and managed to find a secretary, a trim little Sabra who took his quickly scrawled note and promised to give it to Dr. Ben-Horin tomorrow when he returned from his trip to Geneva. Some communications failures here, Hornkastle thought. He felt like inviting the secretary to lunch. It was absurd; the frustrations of his mushroom chase were translating themselves into random sexual twitches. He got out of there fast, went over to the university library, and used up the afternoon with the five volumes of Farnell’s Cults of the Greek States, looking for veiled Amanita references.