At the helicopter Gallagher said, “Want me to fly you back?”
“We’ll drive,” Raglan said, “But thanks.” He paused a minute, then said, “Gallagher? Did you ever make fire with a bow and blunt arrow?”
“Sure. Lots of times when I was a youngster. An old Paiute showed me how.”
Mike Raglan walked out away from the ruin, and thrust a stick in the ground, tying a red bandana to the end. “They should be able to see that,” he said.
At the base of it he placed a crude bow, fashioned from a somewhat bent stick and a piece of rawhide, which he looped around a blunt arrow. Taking a short board from the ruin he gouged out a hole to receive the end of the arrow, then cut a notch from the hole to the edge of the board. In the hole he placed a few shavings; at the notch, the tinder for a small fire.
From his backpack he took a small magnifying glass and placed it on the top of a rock nearby.
Gallagher shook his head. “What’s all that about? I don’t get it.”
“For the Saqua,” Raglan said. “They need fire, they worship fire, but I don’t believe they know how to make fire.”
Kawasi was waiting for him at the car. Melisande and Erik were in the back seat.
Gallagher had walked over with him. “You’re leaving, then?” He waved a hand. “What about all this?”
“All of what?” Mike Raglan looked at him wide-eyed. “I don’t know what you are talking about, Gallagher. Erik thought about building a house out here but changed his mind. We came out to get him. That’s all there is.”
“Are you crazy? You’ve got the greatest story ever. You could write a book, you could—”
Mike Raglan started the car. He looked over at Gallagher, extending his hand.
“I could,” he said, “but who’d believe it?”
The End
AUTHOR’S NOTE
XIBALBA: also written as Shibalba, is frequently referred to in the Popol Vuh, the sacred book of the Quiché Maya, as the lower regions where lived tormentors of men, and a home of all things evil. It is mentioned in The Annals of the Cakchiquels as an underground place of great power and splendor.
HOUSE OF GLOOM: in Xibalba, a place of darkness and shadows, known to few, feared by all.
LORDS OF XIBALBA: referred to in the Popol Vuh as promoters of evil and destruction.
VARANEL: the Night Guards, soldiers of the Lords of Xibalba.
ZIPACNA: a mythological figure of great power, finally destroyed, or at least defeated, by Hunahpu.
ANASAZI: We do not know what the cliff dwellers called themselves or what they were called by their neighbors. The name is of Navajo origin and was given to the ancient ones who preceded the Navajo in the Four Corners area. That there was trade and communication between the Anasazi and the Maya is well established. Mummified parrots from Central America have been found in Anasazi graves. Archaeologists have been slowly piecing together the story of the cliff dwellers from fragments of pottery, weaving, sandals, and such, but they are hampered by the thoughtless vandalism of pot-hunters, who by removing a pot from its place of discovery make it impossible to place it properly in history. Often it is similar to removing several key pieces from a jigsaw puzzle, then expecting the puzzle to be completed.
Much fine, painstaking work has been done, yet we have only begun to learn what the Anasazi have to teach us. I, for one, believe man’s life on this continent and our neighbor continent to the south is much, much longer than has been surmised.
WHAT IS LOUIS L’AMOUR’S LOST TREASURES?
Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures is a project created to release some of the author’s more unconventional manuscripts from the family archives.
Currently included in the project are Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1, which published in the fall of 2017, and Volume 2, which will be published in the fall of 2019. These books contain both finished and unfinished short stories, unfinished novels, literary and motion picture treatments, notes, and outlines. They are a wide selection of the many works Louis was never able to publish during his lifetime.
In 2018 we released No Traveller Returns, L’Amour’s never-before-seen first novel, which was written between 1938 and 1942. In the future, there may be a selection of even more L’Amour titles.
Additionally, many notes and alternate drafts to Louis’s well-known and previously published novels and short stories will now be included as “bonus feature” postscripts within the books that they relate to. For example, the Lost Treasures postscript to Last of the Breed will contain early notes on the story, the short story that was discovered to be a missing piece of the novel, the history of the novel’s inspiration and creation, and information about unproduced motion picture and comic book versions.
An even more complete description of the Lost Treasures project, along with a number of examples of what is in the books, can be found at louislamourslosttreasures.com. The website also contains a good deal of exclusive material, such as even more pieces of unknown stories that were too short or too incomplete to include in the Lost Treasures books, plus personal photos, scans of original documents, and notes.
All of the works that contain Lost Treasures project materials will display the Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures banner and logo.
To Gilbert and Charlotte Wenger
POSTSCRIPT
By Beau L’Amour
Rereading The Haunted Mesa after so many years is a strange experience. Throughout my teens and twenties I was deeply involved in my father’s preparation for the writing of this novel. I hiked along on his many explorations of the Four Corners country. We spent the night in a cliff dwelling, sleeping in a kiva, no less. And in the late 1970s I occasionally became his driver, negotiating the rocky trails and arroyos of the Southwest as we searched for the locations he would ultimately write about. Eventually, I was given assignments that I would research on my own, then return with photographs and reports of what I had found.
The Haunted Mesa is often considered my father’s strangest and most problematic story. It was one of his few attempts at science fiction, and people tend to either love it or hate it. Louis himself found the story difficult to complete and, even after sending the manuscript off to his publisher, remained unsure of whether he wanted to proceed with it.
As with many of his writings, I have no consistent opinion about it. At the time Dad was working on The Haunted Mesa, I was too involved in the process and in my own discovery of some of the weirder and more controversial aspects of the American Southwest. Because of my on-again, off-again work in the motion picture and TV industry, in more recent years I’ve been more focused on what this story could become than on what it currently is. Interestingly, these possibilities branch off in distinctly different directions, like the time lines of alternate universes…but I’ll get back to that.
Regardless of my own ambivalence about The Haunted Mesa’s various qualities, it has always bothered me that I didn’t have a more informed opinion long ago. Early on, my father gave me a portion to read and asked for my advice. It was an important moment in our relationship. However, because I was only in my mid-twenties and still learning a great deal of what I know today, I was able to encourage him, but I don’t think I was able to provide anything particularly useful.
* * *
—
The Haunted Mesa became a part of my life again in the early 2000s, when a conversation with a friend led to a serious rethinking of the issues surrounding the story. That friend was Doug Netter, producer of the science fiction TV series Babylon 5 as well as productions based on some of my father’s work (The Sacketts and Five Mile Creek). Doug was deeply intrigued by the atmosphere and locale of the story, but he was convinced it would be a difficult project to adapt for film. Though I secretly agreed, I told him I was sure I could pull it off.
Doug has since passed away, but I believe th
at he was slyly testing my abilities as a screenwriter. Neither of us was all that serious about trying to sell the project, but since I was also interested in creating some sort of Louis L’Amour comic book series, taking an in-depth look at the project wasn’t a complete waste of my time.
After a couple of months I produced a fairly serviceable TV series “bible” and the first draft of a pilot episode. Adapting the novel had been hard work; however, it had offered me the opportunity to really dig into the story, to take a look under the hood at all its assets and liabilities. The process taught me a great deal about the struggles my father was going through at the time he wrote The Haunted Mesa, and clarified what some of his fans had been complaining about.
* * *
—
Louis’s introduction to the idea of parallel universes can be traced all the way back to before he left Jamestown, North Dakota. In a journal entry many years later, he mentions reading Austin Hall and Homer Flint’s novel The Blind Spot when it was serialized in Argosy magazine in 1921. Though today the story may seem quite dated, it pioneered the concept of alternate universes.
I have always found it somewhat poignant that Louis wrote The Californios, his first foray into inter-dimensional travel, not long after our final manned trip into true, interplanetary space, the flight of Apollo 17 in December of 1972. The possibility of exploring new worlds and new frontiers had run afoul of primitive rocket technology, our inability to bankroll more ambitious trips, and, a population whose attention was turning inward. New worlds, at least fictional ones, might need to be reached in different ways.
It was relatively soon after Louis finished The Californios that he visited a meeting of the Pecos Conference, an informal gathering of people interested in Southwest archeology. Afterward he made the following comment in his journal:
…talked to Art Rohn who excavated Mug House [part of the Mesa Verde complex of ruins]…to the Listers, father and son [Robert and Frank, both archeologists]…and listened to reports from the field. Much interested in the finding of roads leading from Chaco Canyon, rds 18 ft. wide and leading in many directions…Tried my idea for “No Man’s Mesa” on them and they liked it.
“No Man’s Mesa” in this particular case was an early title for The Haunted Mesa. Below is what I’m guessing were Louis’s earliest notes for the story, written not long before he discussed it with his archeologist friends:
The Door into Distance
A man builds a house upon the site of a former cliff dwelling, utilizing some of floor and foundation. One night going into a dark room to look at the blue print he finds a luminous line on the blue print, the outline of a room, a sort of shrine or chapel that is not in the plans as he drew them. In the light the line is invisible.
When an attempt is made to wall up the space for the door, the bricks are torn down and finally a door is put in place. This space beyond the door is where the ancient kiva used to stand. The story is told in a letter to the writer and the owner of the house finally gives in and goes thru the door into distance—and vanishes. Then the writer too, goes thru.
In these initial notes, Mike Raglan’s name was Vernone and Eric Hokart’s was Amory:
Vernone’s friend, whom we will call Amory, has come through the curtain, meets an aged cowboy who briefs him on what has transpired and what he faces.
Does Amory have any electronic equipment? Can he communicate across the dimension? Weave into this the old religion, the multi-dimensional atmosphere to a degree. Make this a haunted, unreal world. The sanity of the old cowboy is important; perhaps an Indian from today.
Take the Anasazi world but create my own based on it, a world of power but unreal, all based on evil but not the obvious torture, imprisonment, etc. Nothing of that. A prison of the mind, of the soul. A destruction of creativity, of originality, of freedom. Perhaps the leaders themselves are trapped, getting deeper and deeper into a quagmire of a horror which if they did not create it they accepted it.
In the early days Dad asked himself a lot of interesting questions, most of them carefully printed on unlined notepaper:
We talk very glibly of time & space, but is that all there is?
Man has invented terms to sort out his universe, to explain the unexplainable—He evolves number-games; amazing himself with explanations that do not explain.
Many kinds of reality. Reality to a bushman? Dream-time? Other worlds taken for granted. Who is right? Are we all right?
Modern man’s science brought as many limitations as discoveries? Has our mind closed to other alternatives?
The issue of time passing at a different rate in the other world delivered a dramatic moment in The Californios. In a prospective line of dialogue, Louis seems to be considering that idea:
If there is a time differential I do not know it and am not consciously aware of it.
There is a moment of vertigo, more with some than others, at the time of transition.
In one of his notes there is a brief indication that Louis considered setting the story in a different era, possibly as a traditional Western or in the days of his youth. He wrote: “Mesa: Decide on period.”
I find this particularly noteworthy, because some of Mike Raglan’s experiences in the novel, like working at the Katherine Mine and traveling through Glen Canyon prior to the building of the dam, would seem to place his age at over sixty. Although Raglan is one of Louis L’Amour’s most mature protagonists, much of the time he does not seem to be anywhere near that old.
Dad always preferred writing about younger characters, and in this case he struggled a bit with both the era of the story and the age of his hero before simply moving on and not worrying about any discrepancies. I find it kind of charming in a way; Dad had a very youthful attitude and never thought of himself as being as old as he actually was.
On several occasions Louis claimed that the story Mike Raglan recalls at the beginning of The Haunted Mesa—the one the old cowboy in the coffee shop in Flagstaff tells about the mysterious country along the San Juan and Colorado rivers—was “true.” That story, as my father told it (pieced together from several sources), goes like this: After being laid off from his job at the Katherine Mine, Louis and a miner from Kingman decided to drive out to the area north of Durango, Colorado, to do some assessment work on a claim that the miner had. They started east along Route 66:
“I was in Flagstaff and I was sitting down at this counter and there was an old cowboy sitting there along side of me and we got to talking…and he asked me where we were going and I said we were taking a trail that was going to take us over east of Navajo Mountain and he said, ‘Oh, I used to punch cows over there and you wouldn’t get me back in that country for all the tea in China.’ I said, ‘What’s the matter, too rough?’ ‘No…it isn’t that, I saw some things over there that nobody should see.’ Naturally, I was curious and asking him questions, he wouldn’t tell me much more except that it had something to do with No Man’s Mesa and that area around there.”
Louis and the miner then headed northeast from Flagstaff. According to Dad, the guy had a Model T outfitted for desert travel, with ropes, tackle, and wire mesh that could be put down for traction. Louis refers to this man as either of Ute or Paiute descent, or as having grown up with the Utes. The various sources do not agree.
“So when I got over there, we were taking a route that led us over that way following the Wetherill Trail part of the way, we camped one night out there and some of his Paiute Indian friends came over to see him and they were sitting around talking and I asked them about No Man’s Mesa. Well they either couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me anything about it and I asked them if there was a trail at the top and they said no there was not. And finally one of the younger ones, he said, ‘Well if you wanted to climb it there’s a place you might be able to,’ and he told me where it was. So I climbed it. Found nothing of cons
equence up there but had a very eerie unusual feeling…I came down off of there and I never forgot the place.”
In other sources, Dad says he found a small ruin and “some masonry” on top. That detail seems consistent with what I was told by an archeologist at Northern Arizona University in the 1980s. The archeologist didn’t go so far as to call it a ruin but did refer to it as a “site.” To complete the narrative, Louis wrote the following in a slightly different version of the story:
“The old miner with whom I left Katherine had grown up among the Utes and they had told him of a possible way up. He told me to go ahead and act the fool if I wished, he’d fix camp. That was daybreak. It was after midnight before I made it back and without his fire I might never have done it.”
As is occasionally the case, there is some blurring of truth and fiction in Dad’s life. Was it really No Man’s Mesa that he climbed? I consider it a possibility. But it also could have been the more modestly sized Tanner Mesa, not far from Mesa Verde. The following is from a journal entry:
I had planned to use the top of Tanner Mesa in a story, and may even now. I have never that I recall been on top. I have been on three sides of it and close up. It may have been the mesa where I went with the old man, years ago when I came to Colorado with him, hunting work. It looks like it, but it was dusk when we drove in there and that was 40 years ago with all the roads different. Hell, it was more than that! I always think of myself as a young.
To my eye both mesas would have been slightly off the beaten track if one was traveling from Flagstaff to Durango. Perhaps for some reason their route took them to Oljeto Trading Post (which is near No Man’s Mesa), and of course Louis may have simply settled on the more dramatic, mysterious, and aptly named No Man’s Mesa (also used in The Key-Lock Man) for this story and consciously or unconsciously adjusted his personal history to fit.
The Haunted Mesa (Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures) Page 34
