by Lin Carter
In the square before me surged a gaudy throng. Brown children shrieked and chased each other; mongrels growled over scraps of garbage, a lemonade merchant jangled his tin cups not unmusically; women robed and veiled in black, with only their kohl-rimmed eyes visible, shrilled as they fought down the price of bright cloth with a fat, fez-hatted shopkeeper; French girls in light frocks from the cruise ship moored in the harbor poked through a wooden tray of silver bracelets and turquoise brooches; oblivious to the noise, the stenches, the milling crowd, an elderly gentleman sat crosslegged under a striped awning, sipping tea with the serene dignity of a graven Ramses; two swarthy Armenians haggled over an opal large as a human eye.
I had caught that bright flash of naked steel from the corner of my eye. Turning in the same instant, I peered into the mouth of a narrow alleyway behind the mosque. It was black as the Styx and choked with putrid garbage. But not so black that I could not see the three men who struggled there and even the reek of rotting garbage could not drown the cold and bitter smell of villainy and red murder—
I sprang upon the taller of the red-robed men and knocked him face down on the slimy cobbles—turned to seize the bony dark wrist of the second man with my left hand, twisting it until the hooked dagger dropped to clang upon the paving stones while I drove the balled fist of my right into his lean belly.
He paled to the hue of sour milk, sank to his knees, eyes rolling up to display bloodshot whites, then folded forward and began noisily to lose his breakfast. Stepping to one side I put my booted foot on the dirty wrist of the first assassin, who was worming stealthily toward the fallen knife; his wrist bones crunched under my weight and he squealed like a gutted lamb. Then I reached for the third man they had been about to mug, caught him by an upper arm and rapidly propelled him out of the fetid darkness and into the clamor and bustle of the marketplace.
He blinked at the dazzling impact of the noontime sun and tottered woozily, panting to recover his breath. I looked him over. He was an odd, comical little man, very thin and quite a bit shorter than I, and somewhere in his sixties as far as I could judge. He was dressed in stained, disreputable khaki shorts and a safari shirt, both several sizes too big for his scrawny frame. A huge, old-fashioned sun helmet covered most of his bony, baldish head. His pointed nose supported a pair of antiquated nose-glasses—pince-nez, I think they are called—these teetered insecurely and were often askew.
His eyes were large and watery and blue, under tufted, snowy brows, and looked curiously out of place in his leathery tanned face, which was bony and long-jawed. A stiff little tuft of white goatee jutted from the point of his chin, and a white mustache bristled from his upper lip, creating the illusion of a Vandyke. When he spoke, his voice was highpitched, querulous, with an Oxford accent; and he spoke in a rather verbose, slightly pompous, very pedantic manner.
“Holy Heisenberg!” he wheezed. “You arrived in the very nick of time, young man!”
“Are you okay?” I inquired. “Did they get your wallet?”
“Eh? Wallet…?”
I nudged his bony hip, felt a reassuring flattish bulge. How the two thieves had lured the old fellow into that dark alley I did not bother to inquire: he looked so absent-minded and unworldly and easily bamboozled, there was no reason to inquire. So I took his arm again, propelled him a quarter way around the square and into the cool dimness of the Cafe Umbala. The Nubian waiter, who knew me well, grinned, white teeth flashing in his ebony face, amused, doubtless, at the odd couple we made. The little man in soiled khaki kit came only to my armpit; he was thinner than the legendary rail, and my weight could have made three of him, or nearly. He waggled a stiff white goatee in my direction and attempted a jerky little bow, which made his old-fashioned sun helmet fall over his bald brow, knocking his glasses askew.
“Your unexpected assistance, sir, was timely and most welcome,” he said breathlessly. “Those two ruffians—!”
I drew him to a seat behind a tiny table set against a wall of flaking plaster adorned with posters advertising such varied amusements as a Parisian chanteuse, who really hailed from Constantinople, a Chinese magician who was actually an exBrooklyn cardsharp of pure Gypsy descent, and a brand of liquor fermented from overripe prunes and fit, from my experience, only for removing old paint from cheap furniture.
“Relax—catch your breath, pop,” I counseled. At my elbow the Nubian waiter materialized like a genie from the Arabian Nights: “Dry mahtini, sah?”
“Yep, Tabiz, the usual,” I said. “What’s your poison, old timer?”
The white tuft of goat-beard jutted skyward stiffly and I received a frosty glare. “Potter is the name, my good man—Professor Potter.”
“Okay, Doc, have it your way,” I grinned. “But what’ll you have?”
He sniffed sharply. “As a rule, I do not indulge…still and all, I suppose…under the circumstances…just to restore the tissues…for medicinal purposes only, you understand!…under the advice of my physician…a drop or two of spiritous beverage can do no harm, surely?”
“Surely,” I nodded.
“Straight gin,” he snapped at the waiter. “Gordon’s, if you stock it; Boodle’s will do.”
It turned out to be Old Mr. Boston, but gin (I have found) is gin.
* * * *
We talked over our drinks. For the past two months I had been out “east of Suez” as Sax Rohmer or Talbot Mundy would put it, in the desert country in Sinai, performing some rather delicate shipping flights in an old Sikorsky chopper supplied me by a Greek importer.
Let’s not mince words: I’d been smuggling out antiquities for a fellow named Pappadappoulas who daren’t risk trying to get the stuff out through customs. Nothing much, just broken pottery and a couple of chewed-up Syro-Roman busts; anyway, the Greek either defaulted or got busted and I found myself with about seventy dollars American in my jeans and the proud owner of a beatup Sikorsky, which was probably also hot. As I carelessly filled the Professor in on my recent business venture, he interrupted me with excitement written all over his whiskery visage:
“A helicopter, you say, my boy? Great Galileo!—how utterly fortuitous! Does it…ah…is the vehicle in sky worthy condition?” he inquired breathlessly, a feverish glint in his watery optics.
I shrugged. “A drop of oil here and there and the other place, and a full tank of the best octane, that’s all it needs. We needed the chopper, you understand, ’cause we had to fly low. Mr. Sadat’s customs men use radar now, and the border country fringes some on Israeli-held territory. Antiaircraft batteries, you know…and trigger fingers get mighty itchy in that part of the world…”
Something like prophetic bliss shone in his misty eyes. An adam’s apple the size of a golfball wobbled up and down in his stringy throat, measuring the intensity of his emotion just as the mercury does in a thermometer.
“When you saved me from those scalawags, my boy,” he said huskily, “I thought…” And he rattled off a line or two of Swahili. Well, it was pure Swahili as far as I was concerned; it turned out to be Greek.
Then he cleared his throat apologetically: “Hem! Forgive me, lad…Simonides the Athenian…‘One welcomes the arrival of a friend in need, even if he be a stranger at the time.’”
“You don’t have to—”
He silenced me with a magnificent gesture. “Not at all! The poet echoed my feelings of the moment; but now that I learn you possess a helicopter, I feel, rather (with Ephialtes), ‘Be serene: the Gods will provide you with the thing you need, in the hour appointed—’”
He leaned forward suddenly, as if to transfix me with that white spike of stiff beard.
“Have you ever heard of Zanthodon?” he whispered hoarsely.
* * * *
Of course, I hadn’t; nor has hardly anyone, this side of the half a dozen or so scholars in the world who read “proto-Akkadian
.” The Doc, as I soon found out, was never so happy as when he was explaining something to somebody. So he began explaining.
“Proto-Akkadian…name of the Underground World…the “Great Below” of the Sumerians, Na-an-Gub…the Babylonians, who came along much later, you know, called it ‘Irkalla.’…”
“No, I don’t think I—”
“Also seems to have been known to the ancient Egyptians and to the Hebrew prophets,” he continued, blandly riding over my interjection. “The Hebrews called it Tehom, the ‘Great Deep’…there resided the nephilim, the earth-giants of Hebrew myths…it appears that the Egyptians may have called the Underground World Amentet. It was the Sacred Land, the Underworld of the Dead—the Land in the West,” he said, with peculiar emphasis, eyes agleam.
“Listen, Professor, I—”
“Now this is particularly interesting, my boy,” he rode on, paying me no mind. “For the Sumerians located their own version of Zanthodon—Na-an-Gub—in ‘the land Martu,’ which is to say, in the west.”
Tabiz brought us a second round. The Doc knocked his straight back as if it were apple juice instead of pure gin. He licked his lips and continued:
“Even the Moslems know the legend…to them it is Shadukiam, the underworld of the djinns, ruled by Al-Dimiryat…Also in the west: “toward the setting sun” …all of these peoples seem to have thought of Zanthodon as a genuine place; more than one traveler, I hazard, actually tried to find it…none were successful, apparently. As the Pyramid Texts put it, in one of their more memorable verses:” and his voice sank to a spooky whisper as he recited,
“None cometh from thence that he may tell us how they fare,
That he may tell us what they need, that he may set our hearts at rest,
Until we also go to the place whither they art gone,
The place from which there is no returning.…”
I have to confess a tingle crawled its way up my spine: there was a ring to the old boy’s voice that the late Boris Karloff might have envied.
I cleared my throat.
“Underworlds are pretty common in mythology, aren’t they?” I said. “Hell and Hades and Sheol…”
He nodded vigorously. “And Duat and Dilmun, et cetera…yes, quite right! But as I was saying, my boy—”
He went on; I gave up, leaned back, and savored my cocktail. There was no stopping Professor Potter once he got started talking.
“My first clue as to the whereabouts of the entrance to Zanthodon I discovered in the old Babylonian creation epic, Enuma Elish…something to the effect that in the month of Adar, the Door to Irkalla lay ‘under the Path of Shimmah’…Now Shimmah (which the Egyptians called Khonuy) equates to the sign Pisces; and the month of Adar in the Babylonian calendar is about the same as the Egyptian month Mesore. Which means February!”
“Um,” I said around a mouthful of martini.
“Then I discovered in Smyrna, in a Greek manuscript of Zosimus the Panopolitan, reference to a fragment of the old Egyptian geographer, Claudius Ptolemy (the fragment is considered dubious by some authorities, but there you are! No one quite agrees on these things)—and Zosimus, quoting Ptolemy, placed the Mouth of Hades (Ptolemy meant Amentet) beneath the path of Pisces in the month Anthesterion.”
He fixed me with an eye glittering with triumph, and a bit too much gin:
“And the Greek month of Anthesterion is our February!”
I looked at him thoughtfully: “I thought Pisces was a sign of the zodiac,” I murmured. “What does ‘the Path of Pisces’ mean?”
He clucked his tongue, just like a lady math teacher I suffered under in the fifth grade: “The signs of the so-called zodiac are stellar constellations, my boy!” he said reprovingly.
Then, brushing aside the ashtray and the now-empty glasses, he began to trace lines and curves on the tablecloth with the stub of a broken pencil fished from an inner pocket.
“In February,” he said breathlessly, “the constellation passes over this belt of North Africa—thus and so—upon this latitude—”
“Latitude 25,” I murmured, studying the rude chart he had sketched.
He tapped a bony forefinger on one particular spot.
“Here, I believe.”
I mentally reconstructed the location from maps I had seen.
“The Ahaggar Mountains,” I said. “In Targa country, surrounded by Tuareg lands. One of the least known, least explored, least visited and most completely inhospitable regions of the entire African continent.”
“Precisely.”
“And just what do you expect to find there?”
His voice sank to an eerie whisper:
“A hollow mountain, leading to the center of the world.”
CHAPTER 2
INTO THE AHAGGAR
During the next two weeks I got to know the Professor quite well. His full name—to quote a grubby, thumbprintsmeared visiting card he flashed to overawe customs officials—read:
Professor Percival P. Potter, Ph.D.
He was suspiciously reticent on the question of what that middle initial stood for, but it was on his passport, which I saw by accident.
“‘Penthesileia’?” I read, incredulously.
He fixed me with a frosty, reproving glare.
“You peeked.”
“Well, I didn’t mean to…but—Penthesileia?”
Professor Potter cleared his throat and gave a little sniff. “My late father was a highly esteemed classical scholar,” he informed me coldly. “Penthesileia was the Queen of the Amazons, in an old Roman epic about the Trojan War, by Quintus Smyrnaeus. My father was perhaps overfond of the epic, which is minor and rather florid…”
I chuckled. “Your dad was also a bit overfond of alliteration,” said I with a grin at Professor Percival Penthesileia Potter, Ph.D.
The Prof was a comical old geezer, all right, but there were a lot of good things you could say about him, as I soon found out. For a skinny little bundle of bones I could pick up in one hand, almost, he had enough guts and courage and boldness for fifty wildcats. During all of our adventures together—and some of them were grueling ordeals, even for a man of my youth—I never once heard him gripe or whimper or complain. He was resourceful, staunch, brave to the point of being foolhardy, and a good man to have at your side when the chips were down.
He was also the smartest guy I’ve ever known. In fact, he knew more about more things than just about anybody this side of Isaac Asimov. I never did quite figure out just what he was a professor of.
For some odd reason, he was rather reticent on that point. Digging around for maps and stuff in the Cairo Museum library, I saw him sight-read a scroll written in old Coptic, and then make a critical remark about the ancient scribe’s sloppy use of diacritical marks. Impressive! But his main interest in finding this mountain gate which (presumably) led down into Zanthodon was to search for fossils and minerals. Strolling through another wing of the museum, he rattled off the names (you know, Latin and Greek stuff) of all the dinosaur skeletons we passed.
“What are you, anyway, Doc?” I asked, somewhat baffled. “Here I thought you were a geologist or a mineralogist, and now you’re making noises like a—whaddayacallum—fossil hunter, dinosaur expert—”
“Paleontologist?”
“Right: paleontologist,” I nodded. “So which is it, anyway?”
He cleared his throat with a little apologetic cough. “Well, a bit of them all, I’m afraid. A bit of a dabbler, you know…”
A paleontologist and geologist, who also knows more about ancient Coptic than the old scribes who used to write in it? Well, that was the Prof: a man of parts, as they say.
Later, as I got to know him better, I found out he had equal qualifications in archaeology, ancient languages, and half a dozen oth
er isms and -ologies. Quite a guy!
But I had amused him by being impressed at his scholarly attainments. He chuckled, rather pleased that he had managed to impress me. Which he certainly had—
“‘Un sot toujours un plus sot qui l’admire,’” he murmured half to himself.
“Come again? That’s French, I know, but…?”
“A fool can always find a bigger fool to admire him,” he quipped, sardonically.
“Oh, yeah? Who says?”
“Boileau-Despréaux,” he replied smugly.
I ground my teeth, cudgeling my memory for a scrap of La Rochefoucauld I half remembered from college:
“Says you,” I snorted. “‘Il n’y pas des sots si incommodes que ceux qui ont de l’esprit’!”
He looked surprised: rather as if a pet chimpanzee had begun a critique of Einstein’s math.
“‘There are no fools so troublesome as those who have some wit,’” he translated. “My boy, you delight me! A splendid put-down, and quite apropos. But I wonder if you recall Goethe’s pointed remark…‘Wir sind gewohnt dass die Menschen verhöhnen was sie nicht verstehen’?”
“Only thing I ever read by Goethe was Faust,” I had to admit. His eyes twinkled:
“But it is from Faust, my dear boy! ‘We are used to see that man despises what he never comprehends.’ There, I trust that puts you in your place?”
It certainly did.
With all those “p’s” in his name, I suppose he just naturally had to be a…polymath.
* * * *
The Ahaggar region which was our goal was many hundreds of miles to the west of Port Said; the entire breadth of the African continent stretched between where we were and where we wanted to be.
Well, one thing was sure: I couldn’t fly Babe (my affectionate pet-name for the helicopter I had inherited, sort of, from my former partner in crime) all the way there. There’s rather a noticeable lack of filling stations in the North Sahara.
