The Himalayan Codex

by Bill Schutt

  Jerry shook his head. “Elephants can make a sound like that?”

  “These can,” she said, before gesturing toward the hole at the top of the dome. “Give me a boost, huh?”

  The men responded instantly and the lithe Brazilian was soon standing on their shoulders, an ear tilted toward the circular opening.

  “Whatcha hear, Yanni?” Mac asked.

  “Shhhhh!” she replied, then said quietly, “The calls are bitonal. Each individual can sing the melody and harmonize at the same time.”

  “Guess it pays to have two trunks,” Mac said.

  Jerry shook his head. “And these are the same little guys Hendry showed you two at the museum?”

  “Yep, miniature mammoths,” Yanni replied, impatiently. “Now will you pipe down already?”

  The calls were certainly very different from anything Yanni or any other human being had heard, yet at the same time they would have been eerily recognizable to anyone familiar with elephant vocalizations. She was still trying hard to decipher the chorus when the calls changed suddenly before fading away, leaving behind only silence.

  Yanni, who had been craning to hear the sounds through the partially open ceiling of the igloo, slowly sank down into a sitting position—the reason readily apparent to her friends.

  Even Jerry, who knew little more about elephants than the typical New York City denizen, seemed to recognize the final notes of this opera. Like a dirge, they communicated the low, painful lamentations of slaves.

  R. J. MacCready was about to move in to comfort his friend when, simultaneously, the lights began to come on again outside their prison. Yanni, ever the fascinated visitor to an increasingly strange world, put aside her sadness, if only for a moment, and watched.

  Bioluminescent life was preparing to greet the morning twilight.

  Soon it was nearly as bright as a full moon outside, bright enough to give depth and shape to shadows moving to and fro in the night. The Morlocks were awake now—if in fact they ever slept at all. One or two of them occasionally came into view, seeming to leer at the prisoners. The combination of their utter alienness and the unusual optics of the ice blocks made it impossible to really know whether their expressions conveyed anger or curiosity—or possibly both. They simply tended to show up on the other side—silently, without any warning or fuss. After a second or two, they vanished like creatures in a dream.

  Eventually one of them showed up and did not go away. Mac believed it to be the same individual he had come to call Alpha. It slid the door seal effortlessly to one side and entered carrying something.

  A few moments later their jailer laid down crudely hewn bowls full of cold soup with generous helpings of the same stringy white fungus that they had been served the day before. In addition, there was a single slab of tough-looking red meat, served on a thin stone platter.

  “What, no steak knife?” Jerry asked the giant, who was standing beside the door, arms at his sides. “Jeez.”

  Mac managed a laugh. “Yeah, why don’t you ask him to leave us a pistol, too?”

  Jerry shrugged his shoulders before taking a sip of the fungus soup. Moments later he was gulping it. “This is even better than yesterday’s,” he announced.

  Mac’s attention, though, was on Yanni, who was clearly gearing up for another of her patented attempts at interspecies communication. As usual, she did not disappoint.

  “Rrrr-rhea,” Yanni half-said, half-trilled—the same whistling note with which she had exasperated Alpha in the caves.

  The Morlock turned its full attention on Yanni. “Rrrr-ah-rhea,” it replied.

  Yanni nodded, and after only two more attempts she echoed it perfectly.

  “That’s amazing,” Mac said, quietly.

  “Yeah, thanks,” Yanni replied proudly.

  “What’s it mean?”

  She shrugged her shoulders, all the while keeping a smile directed at her hirsute instructor. “I have no idea.”

  What Mac did understand was that the level of tension in their igloo prison had dropped several notches.

  Yanni, eager to continue the lesson, pointed to herself and pronounced her name.

  Alpha repeated it.

  Not bad, Mac thought. Then, as he watched, the creature pointed at its own chest and sang out something that seemed far too long and cumbersome to be a name. Perhaps, he guessed, it’s a recitation of ancestry?

  Yanni stifled a laugh at the unpronounceable string of warbles and quickly decided to steer the linguistic exchange in a different direction. She passed her hands over the bowls and the meat, all the while smiling and keeping her movements slow—avoiding anything that might suggest dominance or aggression.

  “Food,” Yanni said, the giant still watching her intently. Then she bowed her head slightly for a moment. “Thank you.”

  Once again, Alpha appeared to consider her combination of gesture and sound before pointing toward the soup. He chirped a few syllables and Yanni began to repeat. Then, without pausing, Alpha gestured toward the meat and pronounced a word, distorted by high pitches that barely passed for syllables. Still, Mac noticed something surprisingly familiar despite the language barrier.

  “Alapas?” Yanni repeated, wrinkling her nose questioningly.

  “Alafas. Alafas,” the Morlock said, then turned and departed.

  Yanni looked to Mac, noticing that he was suddenly less enthusiastic about the prospect of a linguistic breakthrough than he’d been only moments earlier. “Why the puss, Mac?”

  The expression MacCready returned told Yanni that something was definitely wrong. “I think that last bit was Latin.”

  “Latin?”

  “Yeah, a sort of big, hairy, bastardized Latin.”

  “Alafas,” Yanni repeated, slowly, but this time the excitement drained from her voice.

  “Well, whatever it is,” Jerry announced from behind them, “this stuff tastes better than beef.”

  “I think he was trying to say Elephas,” Mac said, quietly.

  Jerry had a flash of recognition and dropped the meat as if it had stung him.

  “It’s the little elephants,” Yanni whispered.

  MacCready suspected that something in the late afternoon soup the Morlocks had brought slowly converted tension and exhaustion into an overpowering sense of relaxation, making it impossible for him to remain alert. The rest of their second day in the igloo prison passed without their captors showing themselves at all. Mac was not quite finished digging a latrine when sleep overtook him. Hours after midnight, with a faint glow from the setting moon filtering down, he and Jerry awoke to find Yanni staring out into the ever-present mist.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” Jerry said, with as much nonchalance as he could muster, “I’d give just about anything for a smoke and a cuppa joe.”

  Yanni said nothing. Both she and Mac were members of a minority who did not smoke cigarettes, although neither of them would have turned down a steaming mug of coffee.

  Outside, the strange air-suspended snow had thickened, and though there was no wind, some of the flakes moved with a life of their own, swirling like plankton.

  “Snowflake mimics,” Mac said, to no one in particular. He rose and took up a position several feet from Yanni, close but not crowding her. “Ya gotta wonder what percentage of this snow is actually alive?”

  Mac had thrown out what he hoped would be a distraction, however brief, from the recent revelation about their breakfast, the remains of which he had hidden out of sight.

  They stood together for a long time, even after the moon had gone down and there was nothing left to see. Like clockwork, as dawn approached the sea of fog, the world gradually filled with phosphorescence, then dimmed its lights with daybreak. Soon there would be only the dull, silvery glow of fog-obscured sunlight.

  The sounds of the mammoths were back as well. Coming from somewhere beyond the carnivorous grass, they rose to a slow and steady murmur.

  Like a communal moan, Mac thought, but did not say.
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  Yanni had a similar thought, and occasionally she was able to snatch glimmers of meaning from an individual call. “It sounds to me like most of them are being put to labor,” Yanni announced. “Others sound like they’re grieving.”

  “Grieving?” Jerry asked. “How can you tell?”

  “Jewell.”

  “That’s the old elephant in Central Park—the one you worked with, right?”

  “She died recently,” Yanni said, in a disturbingly uncharacteristic monotone. Then, after a pause, “These calls are like the ones Jewell made when she was reminded of her sister.”

  Jerry looked puzzled, but said nothing.

  “Jewell’s sister was put down right in front of her,” Mac explained quietly.

  “And these mammoths are using the same language?” Jerry asked. “Fascinating, given their geographic distribution.”

  “Well, sort of,” she responded, seeming to recover a bit from her gloom. “These calls are more complicated and more—subtle—like songs of mourning.”

  The two men remained silent, allowing Yanni to finish her thoughts.

  “And the Morlocks breed them like cattle,” Yanni continued, her anger now rising to the surface. “How very human of them.”

  Mac tried to think of something to say that might soothe his friend, but he found it impossible to get the words out. Yanni wasn’t someone who cried easily, but she was on the verge of tears when Alpha returned.

  The Morlock was looking none too happy himself, upper lip drawn back to expose a pair of no-nonsense canines, body hair erect and bristling.

  This form of communication required no words. It was a language as ancient as the meeting of predator and prey. Hair-lifting arector pili muscles in full contraction. Fangs bared in a message straight from the sympathetic nervous system.

  Mac did not have to look at Yanni to know that she was experiencing a similar array of involuntary responses—now, thankfully, held in check.

  As apparently unconcerned as he was unaware of Yanni’s current mental state, Alpha tossed a piece of multigeared machinery at their feet. The metal parts showed no signs of wear and still bore portions of paper tags affixed with a bit of wire.

  “Let me guess,” Jerry said. “He wants to know who left a mess at the crash site.”

  “Not quite,” Mac added, “although that is a spare helicopter part.”

  “What? They scavenging our bird now?”

  Mac shook his head, then moved in and prodded the device with his foot. “That ain’t from ours.”

  “Well whose is it, then?”

  Chapter 6

  Yeren

  Whatever we believe about how we got to be the extraordinary creatures we are today is far less important than bringing our intellect to bear on how we get together now around the world and get out of this mess we’ve made. That’s the key thing now. Nevermind how we got to be who we are.

  —Jane Goodall

  We become what we do.

  —Chiang Kai-shek

  Shennongjia Forest, Northwest Hubei Province, China

  June 16, 1946 (Four weeks earlier)

  A gust of warm, humid air rushed up from the valley floor—from five thousand feet below the overlook on which Wang Tse-lin had set up his tent. It was well past midnight, and once again the biologist was having a difficult time falling asleep. On most nights he could blame his insomnia on the forest sounds—the breeze rustling through stalks of dead bamboo, the high-pitched chatter of bats, or the incessant call of insects he could not identify. But tonight a new sound came to him—and so he sat up in his low cot, cocked an ear, and waited.

  With his eyes acclimated to the dark, Wang realized that the canvas flap at the foot of his pup tent was closed, although he distinctly remembered tying it open before he lay down.

  Beyond the confines of the tent, from the direction of the small pit of embers where he’d earlier roasted a hare, came a faintly whispered “eh” sound. It was followed by something he made a mental note to record as “a short guttural growl.” A response came from a different direction, high-pitched and composed of but a single brief note.

  Wang had been in the forest for nearly five weeks now, relocating his campsite every three or four days and only occasionally crossing paths with another soul—usually a villager or a hunter, eager to take him up on his offer to buy the skins and skulls of the strange and unique creatures that inhabited the pristine Shennongjia wilderness. One of the endemic mammals was the takin—a large goat antelope whose thick blond coat was said to have inspired the legend of Jason and the Golden Fleece.

  The real prize, if it existed, was the white bear. Some of Wang’s colleagues believed that it existed in legend only, while others suggested that it was an albinic form of brown bear, pointing to the fact that there seemed to be an inordinate number of albino species in this particular forest. Wang, however, hypothesized that the bear was neither legend nor mutant but rather a separate species of Ursus. This, of course, would be a major coup for anyone who could provide physical evidence—especially if that someone was a young university faculty member like himself.

  Now, however, his night visitors seemed a real and present obstacle. Though Wang’s bounty for the skin and skull of a white bear was the highest he had offered for any specimen, experienced hunters would not likely have entered his camp at night. And in these parts, few (even if well armed) would have dared move too deeply into the forest after sundown.

  Locals, he thought, desperate to steal my supplies.

  Wang swung his feet toward the tent opening and, having slept in his boots, he reached for the bayonet he’d recovered from a Japanese soldier, dead now for just over three years. The sounds outside his tent had stopped but somehow he could still feel the presence of someone creeping about the campsite.

  Who else could it be? Can’t be my coworkers, he told himself. None of his three colleagues in the Yellow River Irrigation Committee would have ventured this far into the mountains. Immediately realizing his mistake he shook his head. Make that two colleagues.

  “The River of Sorrow Flood Committee,” is how one of his coworkers had jokingly referred to it on the day the team of four was to depart by boat from the city of Yi Chang. On that same day, the unfortunate jest rendered his colleague a “former associate,” reducing the survey team to a trio. Wang knew that there was no way to make even an educated guess at how many friends back home might now be under arrest or had simply disappeared for committing lesser infractions.

  The great moment of freedom from the yoke of Japanese occupation lasted precisely that long—a mere moment, so quickly did liberators become oppressors. Men known to Buddhist and Christian survivors as “sainted ones” were vilified each day. Fearless acts that saved lives during the war could be transformed, without warning, into examples of “social incorrectness” or even criminality. The fact was that whoever or whatever happened to be prowling his campsite could induce no more terror in Wang than he himself had already seen in postwar Peking and Shanghai. As civil war raged across China, men and women of every age were rounded up in the night, for any reason at all, or for no reason at all.

  The Second Sino-Japanese War had left Wang Tse-lin’s country clinically insane. As a scientist, he had concluded: A human creature driven crazy is a most frightening sight in itself. But when we go crazy together, we are the most terrifying power in all of creation.

  Military and paramilitary mobs now roamed well-paved big city streets and muddy backwater villages, given free range by whatever gifted abomination of an orator happened to be in command at any given moment. There were intimidating, openly circulated stories about whole families executed, with the parents granted the mercy of death only after watching their children precede them.

  Which should I fear more, the rabid mobs or what might lurk right outside, among the rattling bamboo?

  For Wang (himself a Ph.D. recipient at Northwestern University in Chicago), a months-long assignment in a primeval deciduous forest w
as a blessing, specifically because it took him far away from the madness that had so tightly gripped much of his country.

  Could my visitors be soldiers sent to arrest me? he wondered, his body reacting to the question with an involuntary shudder. Pulling aside the tent flap, he stepped outside and stood, holding the bayonet.

  The River of Sorrow—not a misnomer, Wang Tse-lin had thought upon hearing his coworker’s joke, though his own response was stony indifference. He knew that the accumulated sorrows of more than two millennia occurred at the whim of the Tibetan Plateau’s glaciers and vast underground springs. Although these were hundreds of miles to the west, without warning they frequently changed the Yellow River from a muddy stream into a flood-blasted channel.

  Currently Wang’s two remaining colleagues were stumbling around in the humidity and heat of the river valley below.

  “What a waste of time,” he told himself. Drafting details of riverbank profiles that might disappear even before those maps can be sent home—only to be ignored by bureaucrats more concerned with not joining “the disappeared” than with the lives of those living along the river.

  Nonetheless, Wang knew that it was important for him to keep the charade going, for to place scientific reality or good sense above political reality could be just as fatal as a coworker’s casually tossed joke.

  Wang Tse-lin looked in every direction around the campsite, noticing at once that it was completely fogged in. The full moon, which would have been only intermittently visible through the canopy, was covered in thick gray gauze. Even the night sounds seemed to have been swallowed by the heavy wet mist.

  No one here, Wang thought. Maybe it was my—

  The sound of a misplaced footfall on a dead bamboo stalk stopped the thought and he spun in the direction of the disturbance. Flicking on a battery-powered lamp, he aimed the beam into the forest. The fog consumed most of the light before it could reach the source of the sound; it threw the rest of the rays back at him, producing a shapeless white glare.