“If I kill the eight and ride away on the ninth, then nobody in the world can catch me. I will be as fleet as the storm and will tower over all the footmen of the world.”
So he killed the eight horses and rode away on the ninth. There was a great outcry, but an outcry of footmen cannot bring a man down from his horse. He rode away on the last great stallion, and goaded it all day long, as he was in a state of exaltation.
At evening when it had run all day it fell dead at the foot of the cliff. This surprised Little Fish-Head, who knew very little about horses and thought they would run forever. It was then that he climbed the cliff to a dizzy height and scratched a dirge as tall as he could reach. This was the inscription that the professor in his pride had misread. It was not a stylized fish at all. It was a stylized horse without any legs, for it was lying down dead. And the little triangle was not the signature of Little Fish-Head, but the soul of the horse leaving the body, triangular rather than square or round to indicate the incompleteness of the soul of a noble but irrational animal.
What the inscription really said was this:
“Oh my horse,
All the swiftness is now gone out of the world.
No man again can go higher than his own height,
Nor more fleeting than he was born to go.
The last man has ridden on the last wind,
And only the dust can ride on the whirlwind now.
I have climbed to this height
To write that the high aspiration was only a dream.
And if even a horse dies
How can a man live forever?”
The next chalk-mark was made about nine thousand years later and was nearly a foot higher. There had been no improvement in the art of climbing meanwhile, but it had been scratched by a taller man.
It was a double wavy mark like a snake or a river, followed by an abrupt despairing downstroke. Professor Potter had made nine tentative translations of this. The seventh of the nine has now been proved by a miracle of scholarship too intricate to explain to be the correct one. This is it:
“There is no water and I have traveled for days in agony. I have climbed this Cliff to look for the river. I see it, but I will die before I can go that far; it would take me three days to reach it. I had thought I could climb as high as the cloud and wring it out, but the little cloud has passed and there is no other. The sun has become my friend now, but he is as much at a loss as I what to do. But at least I have seen the river before I die.”
After that it was only nine hundred years before the next climber achieved. And he carved these letters: “Pasó por aqui A-Dmo 1519 Mayo 19 José Ramíres Castillo y Sanches.”
His message is too definite and leaves little to the imagination. He was not thirsty, for he did not carve like a thirsty man. He was not overly weary, so perhaps he had come on one of the new horses. Nor had he (the professor said) come alone. There were drill holes in the rock where rope hooks had been placed, and he must have had at least two assistants. But we cannot picture him more clearly than this.
And oddly the next chalk-mark was made exactly four hundred years later. And it read: “Piñon Gap High School Seniors 1919 Clement Kincaid, Freddy Stockton, Manuel Cervantes We Are The Tops.”
And in the high school annual of that year there were their three pictures on a page by themselves entitled “The Topper Club, The Most Exclusive in the World.”
And to continue the spate of climbers in the very next decade was a higher entry:
“Bo McCoy, I am the Real. I am a Bo. 1925 June Tenth.”
Quite a bit could be made from this. The railway was twenty miles away, and there was no stop. He had rolled off it and crossed the desert to make his mark. He might have been a lonesome hobo as colored men are likely to be on that run. And he had a long old walk to the next stop. And he made what was then the highest chalk-mark on the cliff. And he had climbed alone nine feet higher than it was possible to climb to make it.
That was all until the professor came. The professor was G. A. D. Potter, for his name was Gamiel Audlich Dagobert, all of which he hated. But he liked to be called Gad. “Gad, Gad,” his associates would say, “you could rope down from the top or use a 'copter to read the scratches. There is no reason to waste a summer on the Tor. There are better things found digging in the ground than you ever will find on the side of a cliff.”
But the professor was a cliff-climber and a chalk-marker, and he had an exaltation to go the highest.
We will not tell you what he carved on the cliff, for it was pedantic and stilted, and he had prepared many drafts of it before he went up the cliff the last time.
He spent six weeks in his tent at the foot of the cliff with his wife, Aurora, and they prepared as though it were Everest. They drilled holes and set lead shields in the rock with eyelets for the ropes. They spun webs of lines and hauled and pulled and rappelled, and did all the things that cliff-climbers do. They cut hand holes and foot holes, and even established a camp “A” two thirds of the way up. And to it they went up and down on a rope ladder where Little Fish-Head and Bo McCoy had climbed like monkeys.
But maximum effort is required for maximum achievement, and the professor was remarkably persevering, as all professors are, and Aurora was remarkably good natured, as all professors' wives must be.
Early in the morning of the last day of spring they went up their ropes and scoop holes till Aurora stood firmly on a newly hewn ledge where Bo McCoy had hung on air. Than the professor climbed onto her shoulders and made the highest chalk-mark.
We will not record what he carved, as he has already done so, and besides, as we said, it was too stilted and stylish. But yet like all the other marks it was capable of variant and fuller translation. In a later time by another professor who might not have the key to the precise letters themselves, it would be more correctly translated as follows:
“I have slain the nightmare and set down the terror. I have climbed beyond dizziness on a cliff that once hung down from the sky before there was a world below it. Even the eagles when they were new would not fly this high. And this above all, while others have ridden on the wind, I only have ridden on the daughter of the wind. This is a red-haired goddess, a strong slight amazon, a magic anemonead with hair like a red sea and shoulders soft and sweet as the night itself. She sways beneath me but will not break, and the early sun is on her and she is silver and flame. Her neck is of living ivory.”
And the rest of it would be very hard to translate even by the best paleocalligraphist. But he would know that this was the hand of an ancient poet who had climbed a dizzy cliff to write a hymn to the dawn.
Holy Woman
“In the Missal the Saints are classified as Martyrs, Confessors, Bishops, Doctors, Virgin Martyrs, Virgins, and Holy Women who are neither Virgins or Martyrs. “Martha was a Holy Woman who was neither Virgin nor Martyr.”
“That sounds like the beginning of a story, Sour John.”
“It is. It's a common story and it happened in a common place, here. It was not in one of the out-of-the-way sites of the world in which I am accused of romancing; not in leering Liverpool or in nyktozoic New York; not in pristine Paris or sun-kissed San Diego; not cerulean Newport News, or exotic Omaha, or protean Cincinnati. It happened right here in prosaic Jebel Shah.”
“Well, tell the story, and also tell me how you got your nose scratched up like that.”
“The story I will tell. I am in this story myself nose and noggin. Now, as you have only been in Jebel Shah for two days and I have been here for more than five, I will give you a little background on our temporary home.
“This is the free-est (are there two e's or three in that most exciting of words) port of the world. Here nobody has any restriction on him whatsoever. This is the only port left in the world where a man is free openly to own slaves. That institution, and a sort of old-fashioned blind grinding poverty are the only things that curtail the full enjoyment of life. And they curtail it very little.
“And when I have dwelt on all that I will add a piece on this town. It has an arrangement unique in the world. This town built in two half circles one above the other like stalls at the opera, where all the houses are open at the front and all face each other, where the three cafés are here adjacent and all of the sidewalk variety, and where the harbor is itself the central court so you can reach out from your café table and strike matches on the tops of the masts as the ships lie below. This town is the only geometric figure possible where every person in its bounds can see and call to every other person.”
“This is a long way around to the holy woman Martha, and your own cat-scratched bugle.”
“I know it. But it was the openness of the town where everyone knows the business of everyone else that was one of the severest trials of Martha with her shame of a no-good husband, and that was one of the things that made her a holy woman.
“Let us begin at the beginning. Adam had several children, from one or the other of them all the inhabitants of this town derive. Martha was born here in a curious way, but it was not so curious here as it would be elsewhere. She was born in a pannier in the dust in front of the stone gate of the orphanage of the Little Sisters of the Child Jesus at Jebel Shah Established for the Alleviation of Misery and the Cherishing and Instruction of the Young. There was a note in the basket with Martha: ‘This is my little girl, cherish and instruct her as I wish I had been cherished and instructed, and may God bless you as I wish he had blessed me.’ You see, this town although the happiest one in the world also has its component of misery.
“The Little Sisters had the custom of Cherishing and Instructing the children until—until—well that is the point. We don't know what would be the logical end if the actual end did not always appear. But whenever the third year came around they would begin to look anxiously out over the hills and at the desert beyond. And if it were a few months late in coming the anxiety would turn to consternation. For it was not a large place and when it was crowded so that you could take no more and still they came, what could you do? And then finally he would come like a welcome rain or an inevitable solution; he would come out of the desert, Sh'lom Jubel the brigand. He and his band always lightly looted the town, more as a gesture than as a visitation; and they would also loot the orphanage and carry off the fifty oldest children, for whom it would otherwise be impossible to find homes. These they would sell or trade into different degrees of servitude. It was this constant, or tri-yearly flow, of well-taught children of the orphanage of the Little Sisters that provided a leven to many a flat and rude rock town, and began to infuse grace into some of the graceless places of the world. In this business the brigand Sh'lom Jubel was something of a benefactor to the whole countryside.
“Martha was taken with the rest of the children and passed through the channels of trade. She did not move well. She was beautiful, but she was the only one who knew this. She'd blue eyes, certainly an odd color for them to be, and her hair had not much more pigment than a field of ripe wheat, it was in fact that very shade.
“She was won finally on the turn of a card by a brainless adventurer named Johann ibn Kabh, which is to say Jack McCabe. This odd little man married her honorably, not knowing what else to do with her, and not realizing that she would regard a little thing like that as permanent.
“He was a Levantine Irishman; one of his ancestors had missed the boat when the last crusaders went home, or possibly was put off the boat before it sailed. Jack was the sort of man who was called in French coquin, in German schelm, in Napoli he would be a scellerato, in Rio a canalha, in Buenos Airesan atorrante, in Bogata a lamina, in Habana a chandetero, and in proper Spanish there is no word for him just as there would be no such type in Spain. In Yiddish I could not but call him schlimazl, in Arabic sirruk, in Russian merzavets, and in Irish a bitheamhnach. I doubt if there is an English name for that kind of man.”
“How about bum.”
“The very word. If I had been able to think of that I would have been able to save myself all that trouble. Jack was a bum. But I did not know he was a bum when I met him or I would have saved myself a wounded nose. I don't know whether Martha realized he was a bum from the first, but it would have made no difference. He was her husband and that was all that can be said.
“Most of what I tell you of her and Jack was narrated to me by Martha herself, as she talked to me quite a bit in the several hours that we were acquainted.
“Jack was an old fairground swindler, an Irish fawney man. He worked the menzils, the camping grounds of the caravans. He set up little thimble rigs in the markets. If he saw one little boy watching one little goat he would match coins with him. If he met a beggar with his bowl he would want to go him double or nothing what was in it. He once sold a blind man a blind dog to lead him. But that worked out well as they were both familiar with every foot of the town and could move freely, and neither one ever found out that the other one was blind. He sold old scribbled-up goat skins to paleontologists and knuckle bones of the Saints to pilgriming Christians. He sold pieces of the cross of Dismas to the thieves, and peddled sly gin to sinful Moslems.
“But mostly he gambled. He would lose everything he had and then he would stake his wife. The first time that happened she was frightened. She was won at poker by an old purple faced plutocrat, and for all she knew he might be purple all over. He wanted to possess her at once but fortunately she kept her presence of mind. ‘As long as the cards are out we might just go one hand of gin rummy,’ she said. ‘Boker, boker, blay boker’ he preferred. ‘Just one little hand of gin rummy for only a piastre.’ And once she got him started she had him, for she was, and is, the best gin rummy player in Jebel Shah. So she won her freedom and went back to her husband, Jack the bum. But he didn't appreciate this at all. He howled like a thubba. ‘You quit when you were winning! Why did you quit? You might have taken him for everything. Billah, she quit in the middle of a hot streak!’ But after that they came to an understanding. He could stake her and lose her, and they both always knew that she could always win herself back again. But she would not gamble for anything but her freedom.
“In other ways he was a trial to her as she tried to establish a happy home for them. If there was to be soup in the pot or fish on the table she had to earn it. If anyone brought home the bacon (and believe me it was not easy to come by with the country being possessed by the pig's two worst enemies) it was she. And when the rent was paid (and sometimes it was) she paid it.
“She worked as a book-keeper and typist for a tight-fisted old Phoenician (one of the last of them) and collected from very poor families three milliemes a week on one piastre that had been loaned to their ancestors, in one case more than three thousand years before. She taught French to the children of merchants, and read the Wall Street Journal to a wizened little exporter. She wrote letters for the unlettered, and did sewing for cranky rich ladies. She did washing, and that isn't easy in a town where there is neither soap nor water. She sold go
at milk and hooked rugs. And everything that she made her husband spent on flashy clothes or lost on his ventures or by gambling.
“But she never gave up establishing a happy home. They had no children as Jack always paced the floor all night smoking cigarettes as he thought up new projects to bring him fame or fortune; or else he was away from home living it up. She finally rode out to the desert to see her old friend, the brigand Sh'lom Jubel, and from him bought on easy time payments a young boy and girl.
“Jack was furious. ‘Who is going to feed these gaping mouths?’ ‘I will feed them the same as I feed you.’ After that he never noticed them; in fact ignored them so completely that several years later in a sudden touch of curiosity he asked Martha what were their names and how many of them there were around the house anyhow. ‘Only two, you say? It always seemed like there were more of them than that.’
“One day Jack came home and said that he had decided to become a Jew. ‘You will not be a Jew’ she said. ‘I'd as soon see you a Methodist or a Covenanter. I won't permit it. Why do you want to be a Jew?’ This was in the year of the troubles. ‘It is the only way to save our farm and cattle and sheep and keep from being driven into the desert without recompense.’ ‘We don't have any farm or cattle or sheep. We're town people. All we have is a house with the rent not paid, and yesterday you sold the rug and that was the only furniture in the house.’ ‘If we are not Jews the Jews will persecute us, and if we are not Moslems the Moslems will persecute us.’ ‘What is new about that? We will still be Mesihiyun and be persecuted by both sides as we have always been. This is the only fun they get and it keeps them from fighting with each other. I won't let you be a Jew.’ The Mesihiyun are border country Christians.
“But he did not take her advice to heart for another day he came home and said he had decided to be a Moslem. ‘You will be no such thing. I would as soon see you a Baptist or a Brahmin. Why do you want to be a Moslem?’ ‘I want to be a Moslem and have four wives.’ ‘You don't even know what to do with one. I won't let you be a Moslem.’
The Man Who Talled Tales: Collected Short Stories of R.A. Lafferty Page 16
