The Dark Backward

by D. W. Buffa

  “But Adam -”

  “That can’t be his name.”

  “No, that was just what he was called at first by those who found him and then accused him. No one could learn their language, though they don’t seem to have much trouble learning ours.”

  Holderlin glanced at the neat stacks of paper on his desk.

  “That’s what I’ve been doing, for forty years; the reason I couldn’t go back to the university; the reason there are people who think I lost my mind. I’m writing the dictionary of their language, and not just that, but an etymology in which I try to trace its influence through all the ancient languages, and through them, into ours. It is very difficult work. But tell me, what name did he have? It’s important.”

  “The girl’s name is Alethia; his name is Lethe.”

  Holderlin’s eyes lit up.

  “That’s really quite wonderful! It’s Greek. Didn’t you know? Lethe in Greek means forgetfulness; Alethia, on the other hand, means truth. Truth and forgetfulness – Do you see the connection? The truth, to be preserved, has to be forgotten; hidden from view, so that only a few can know to find it. The island has been hidden from view for hundreds of years, but now, suddenly, it has been discovered. Do you really believe that was an accident, Mr. Darnell? Do you really believe that after twelve thousand years, they had not prepared for every eventuality; that they hadn’t learned, far beyond anything we know, the arts of concealment? There is a reason they let themselves be discovered, a reason why the city is still secret. Think about it, Mr. Darnell – Why did someone come to see you, why did he use my name? - To help you with your defense? What did he tell you that helped? You could not use anything he told you; no one would have believed you if you had tried. He came to see you, Mr. Darnell, because he had to help Lethe escape, and because he wanted you to find me.”

  “To find you? But why…?”

  “Because he wanted me to know what had occurred, that the island had been discovered and that something was going to happen.”

  “Going to happen? What do you mean?”

  Holderlin did not hear him. He was back in the past, seeing everything through his still youthful eyes.

  “He told me he would, that one day he would send for me; that I could come back to the island and never have to leave.”

  “Why didn’t you go back a long time ago? Why did you think you had to wait until you heard from him?”

  Holderlin shook himself out of his reverie.

  “What? Oh, yes – why didn’t I go back? I tried. A few years later, I went back, but the island wasn’t there. I couldn’t find it.” He gave Darnell a knowing glance. “But that won’t be a problem now. They want us there.”

  Chapter Twenty One

  The village on the southern coast of Peru was not a village anymore. The dusty tavern where Gerhardt Holderlin had forty years earlier made the dangerous acquaintance of Alberto Lopez Rodriquez had been torn down and replaced with a modern hotel. The fishing boats that had once been hauled up on the beach at night were now motorized craft with all the latest electronics, each with its private berth in a protected marina. On their first night there, the two men lingered over a dinner prepared by an Argentine chef in a well-lit restaurant filled with eager-eyed tourists.

  “Everything changes,” remarked Darnell.

  “Almost everything,” replied Holderlin. He did not have to mention the exception he was thinking about. For the last week, from the time they left Berlin, to the trip to the ruins of Cuzco in the Peruvian highlands, they had talked about little else than the unbelievable story both of them believed.

  “It must have been more interesting then, when you first came here, down the coast of Peru, listening to the stories the old men told, trying to discover something that would tell you where to begin your search.”

  Holderlin finished off a glass of beer and ordered another.

  “When you’re that age – young as I was then – you think everything is possible, but you also think that if you live as long as this – as old as I am now – what you did will seem like some distant dream. You must know what I’m talking about. It was forty years ago, but it seems more like forty days, just last month, that I was here. Everything looks different, but that isn’t what I see.”

  “Do you still see Alberto Lopez Rodriguez, the look on his face when you showed up again, a year later, after he threw you overboard and was certain that you had drowned?”

  “No, that never happened. I never tried to find him. He tried to kill me once; I didn’t want to tempt fate a second time.”

  “But I thought…. Yes, of course, how would anyone have known?”

  “He told you everything I told him, and I told him that as well. I said I was going to do it, find Rodriquez and make him think I had come back from the dead, sent by the devil to get my revenge. I was young, and after what I had found, after the year I had spent, my mind was full of all the adventures I had not yet experienced.”

  Holderlin’s gaze drifted to the crowded bar where a bartender with a sleek graying mustache and black steely eyes flashed a set of perfect white teeth as he took the tourists’ money.

  “That might be him, old Rodriquez, who may have used what he stole from me to start his first business. Isn’t all property based on theft?”

  After dinner they strolled down a narrow, palm-lined street, talking about their plans for the morning, when they would start their journey into the Pacific.

  “The boat has been chartered; the captain, unlike Rodriquez, is reputable and reliable,” said Holderlin, puffing on his pipe. “And the weather is perfect. Look, a full moon and just a few scattered clouds.”

  “Do you think Adam is there? Do you think he and the girl went back to the island?”

  Holderlin stopped at a stone fountain and splashed some water on his face. He looked again at the moon, guessing at the time.

  “We leave early,” he said, worried about Darnell. “We’d better get back to the hotel.” They walked a while in silence before Holderlin ventured an opinion about Adam and the girl.

  “I don’t think so. I’ve been thinking about what you told me. They got away, the two of them, on that boat that belonged to your friend - The two of them, Mr. Darnell, not the three of them. My old friend from the island didn’t go with them. He waited, and then must have gone back the same way he had come, whatever way that was. But if they were going back to the island, why wouldn’t they have all gone together? No, something else is going on, and I think I know what it is. They’re moving, the lost tribe, going somewhere else, starting somewhere where they won’t be found again. Perhaps not all of them, maybe just those two: Lethe and Alethia - Adam, as you call him, and the woman who is both his sister and his wife. That’s all it would take, two people, to start all over, to make sure that they don’t die out. Did you ever consider the possibility that the story of Genesis isn’t about the beginning of the human race, but about its continuance; that the Garden of Eden was, like the island, just a stopping place, where something that had been going on forever could have a new beginning, another long cycle of existence?”

  A warm breeze rustled through the palm trees. Somewhere in the night a bird called out and, in a language only they could understand, another bird called back.

  “Come to my room for a moment,” said Holderlin when they got back to the hotel. “I have something for you.”

  Holderlin’s gift was a thin, tattered paperback book, an old copy of something published more than half a century before. Darnell’s eyes brightened at the sight of what he remembered reading when the book was new and everyone was reading it.

  “Kon-Tiki! It’s a title I never forgot,” he said, fondly turning it over in his hand. “Nor the name of the author: Thor Hyerdahl. Thank you, but why this particular -?”

  “Because more than anything else that book told me that I was right, that I wasn’t just pulling things out of the air, finding connections were there weren’t any. I told my friend on the island mos
t of what led me to go on that search of mine, but I didn’t tell him about this. It wouldn’t have made much sense to him. I also wanted to hold something back, so as I learned more about what had happened to them I would have a way to test some at least some of it against what we in the modern world had discovered on our own. Although in this case, it was more what Heyerdahl did not think to ask than what he set out to prove. He wanted to show that people of South America had settled the islands of the South Pacific; he didn’t ask where these same people had first come from. When you read it – and I’ve marked the passages – you’ll see how close he might have gotten if he had only, so to speak, looked the other way.”

  Darnell called Summer when he got to his room. After a long conversation in which he swore he had not once failed to take his medication, he climbed into bed and began to read. He had not read two sentences of the first passage Holderlin had marked before he knew Holderlin was right. At the beginning of the book, Heyerdahl had written:

  “The Inca Indians had their great empire in the mountain country when the first Spaniards came to Peru. They told the Spaniards that the colossal monuments that stood deserted about the landscape were erected by a race of white gods which had lived there before the Incas themselves became rulers. These vanished architects were described as wise, peaceful instructors, who had originally come from the north, long ago in the morning of time, and had taught the Incas’ primitive forefathers architecture and agriculture as well as manners and customs. They were unlike other Indians in having white skins and long beards; they were also taller than the Incas. Finally, they left Peru as suddenly as they had come, the Incas themselves took over power in the country, and the white teachers vanished forever from the coast of South America and fled westward across the Pacific.”

  Darnell had read these lines before, read them as a young man when Kon-Tiki first came out, but they had not meant anything like what they meant now. Holderlin had marked most of the next page. When the first Europeans came to the Pacific islands, they found to their astonishment that there were “whole families conspicuous for their remarkably pale skins, hair varying from reddish to blonde, blue-grey eyes, and almost Semitic, hook-nosed faces.” A few lines later, Heyerdahl described reading the “Inca legends of the sun-king Virakocha, who was the supreme head of the mythical white people in Peru.”

  “Mythical!” Darnell cried, laughing out loud.

  Virakocha turned out to be the name of fairly recent date. The original name was Kon-Tiki, the “high priest and sun king of the Incas’ legendary ‘white men’ who had left the enormous ruins on the shores of Lake Titicaca.”

  A few pages later, in the last marked passage, Heyerdahl quoted a museum director in New York, “‘It’s quite true that South America was the home of some of the most curious civilizations of antiquity, and that we know neither who they were nor where they vanished when the Incas came to power. But one thing we do know for certain – that none of the peoples of South America got over to the islands in the Pacific.”

  Heyerdahl proved that in fact those ancient people did get to the islands in the Pacific. But if he proved where they had gone, he never asked where they had come from. Darnell put down the book. It seemed incredible that neither Heyerdahl nor anyone else had asked why, if these white men were so mythological, so much the stuff of legend, Heyerdahl not only went looking for them, but found them, on the islands of the South Pacific. Heyerdahl had made a great discovery and, though it was staring him right in the face, let a far greater one slip away. Millions had read his book, and no one, including especially the author, had known what it really meant until a young German had been given a copy of it by his father, an archeologist who hoped to encourage in his son a sense of the mystery of ancient places.

  Through the open shutters of the French doors that led to the verandah, Darnell watched soft silver clouds, blown by the eastern wind, drift past the moon and move down toward the sea. He would be there himself tomorrow, on the ocean for the first time since he had been a young man sent to war, a voyage to seek a city that no one was supposed to find. He felt a strange contentment in the knowledge that while he might have only a few more years to live he had seldom felt so alive. He fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  He awoke with a sudden sense of terror to a tremendous, ear-shattering noise. It was as if the earth itself had exploded. He sat bolt upright, bracing himself as the whole building began to sway. It was an earthquake, a major one. Darnell sprang out of bed and was immediately thrown to the floor. The glass windows began to shatter and huge cracks started twisting down the heavy stucco walls. He crawled across the bedroom floor to the bathroom doorway, the safest place to be, and then watched in stunned amazement as the French doors began to sink, slowly at first, as if they were just slipping a foot or two, and then, before he knew it, the entire wall fell away. The floor began to buckle and he felt himself start to slide. Then, suddenly, it was over and everything stopped moving. There was a long, agonizing silence, and then the screaming started, people trapped under rubble calling for help, people paralyzed with fear screaming at the almost total devastation that had in less than one long unbearable minute taken place.

  Darnell’s heart was racing; his eyes, his face, were full of dust. The windows and the outer wall were gone. The building, though still standing, had been turned into a living, breathing thing, a half-dead monster that at any moment might lose its balance and fall flat over on its side. Darnell grabbed his clothes and started out the door. He met Holderlin in the hallway.

  “Are you all right?” he asked Darnell as they hurried down the stairs.

  “I’ve been in earthquakes before, but never one like this. I thought I was going to fall right down the floor into the street.”

  They got outside and, standing among the crowd of dazed hotel guests, made sure they were each in one piece. The earthquake had struck just before dawn. With the first rays of sunlight, the line of crumbled buildings and stone littered streets stretched out as far as the eye could see. There did not seem to be a single structure that had escaped unscathed. The front of the hotel had been ripped away, each of the rooms now open like the back of a doll house, with beds and chairs all tangled together just waiting to plummet down to the ground. It was difficult to breath for all the smoke and dust. Clutching their few belongings, they picked their way through the rubble to the beach on the other side.

  The marina and most of the boats in it had been destroyed, but the larger craft, anchored off shore, had come through it safely. The captain of the boat they had chartered was waiting for them near what was left of the dock.

  “I’m glad you’re safe, gentlemen. We better go. There may be another one, and the aftershocks will be bad enough. It’s a miracle you’re both alive.”

  A few minutes later, they were safe on board the sixty foot motor craft headed out into the Pacific. The captain, a small, meticulous man who was always apologizing for imperfections no one noticed, kept them informed about every new development. The earthquake, he reported that day at lunch, had registered 8.0 on the Richter scale.

  “A colossal power of destruction,” he explained with the peculiar pride of those who, having survived a disaster, wish it to be remembered as one of truly legendary proportions. “Greater than anything seen in years.”

  “Where was it centered?” asked Holderlin with more than normal interest.

  The captain was embarrassed that he did not know.

  “Somewhere offshore, somewhere in the ocean,” he replied, averting his gaze. “The radio reports didn’t say anything more than that,” he added defensively, as he began to concentrate on the food on his plate.

  Holderlin seemed to grow tense, and more pre-occupied, as the days passed and they drew closer to the island. Darnell thought it must be the weight of anticipation, forty years living alone, not just physically, but morally and spiritually; forty years living with a secret he had not been able to share, a discovery that, if he could have revealed it,
might have changed the way the world thought about itself and altered in the most fundamental ways what people believed. Forty years living in that book-cluttered apartment, working feverishly on that dictionary of his; a dictionary which, even if he were ever to finish it, would probably never be published, a strange unintelligible manuscript detailing a language which, more than forgotten, had never existed. That without question would be the judgment any expert would pass on it. Atlantis? – A legend. The language of Atlantis? – A literary hoax, an academic fraud; the made up language of a man who, judging by the effort, might be a genius, but was certainly demented.

  “When we get there, what do you intend to do?” They were standing at the starboard railing under a blistering sun. Holderlin, who did not seem to mind the heat, was bareheaded; Darnell was wearing a floppy straw hat.

  “What do I intend….? Whatever they want me to do. There is a reason they went to all this trouble, a reason they wanted you to find me. I just hope we’re not too late.”

  “Too late? You think the earthquake might have…?”

  “All we get out here is what the captain learns on the radio. There’s so much destruction, so many people dead or injured, no one on shore is going to take any time to find out what might have happened on a tiny island a thousand miles away.”

  Something was missing. Squinting into the blinding sun, Darnell tried to grasp what Holderlin had failed to say.

  “It’s more than the fact that the earthquake happened, more than the damage it might have caused. You think…?”