Inland

by Téa Obreht

  She had a long, ill-tempered stare, Amelia, and shared her father’s suspicion of most things—though naturally not of you. She just about tolerated you to be near her, and you just about tolerated her to be pulling at your chin hairs, and between you there ran a kind of grudgeful truce that everyone felt all right about.

  Amelia turned Jolly superstitious. He uttered so many ma’ashallahs around her that people thought it was her name.

  I barbed him about it, knowing myself as guilty of such nonsense as he was. Hadn’t I grown wary of filling my canteen, lest it show me something terrible might befall her? Giving in to Donovan’s want now, didn’t I pray to see nothing of what might come, and look only toward the past, to my youth and yours, till the faces I saw resembled Jolly’s drawings more than they did our raggedy selves?

  A year without running. A good year after all. And then another.

  It must’ve been right around the time Amelia turned two when a couple of prospectors came into town with a story to tell. Over three nights while they slept in some distant gulch of the Salt River, their camp was visited by a presence, heard but unseen, that wilded the horses. The more superstitious of the two fellas convinced the other that they should not, on their very lives, try to see the creature while it groaned and scraped around outside—but on the fourth night, his friend’s curiosity got the better of him. So quietly they lifted the tent flap. And what should they see besides moonlight?

  “An ugly fucker to end all belief—just like the one you got here!”

  Well, this got Jolly all worked up. Now and again he’d heard of old survey camels sighted west of the Colorado—but such tales tended to be well-worn by the time they reached him. This particular encounter, on the other hand, might be a sign that one of your cousins had finally found its way deeper into the Territory. We got the map out right away, and decided quick enough there’s little strategy to divining where a wild camel might turn up. Best we could figure was to lie up at the creek nearest where the prospectors had survived their strange visitation, and wait.

  “Just think,” Jolly said. “What if there’s more than one? We could have ourselves a real little caravan.”

  What did he want with a caravan? We were only two men, after all. And you’d always preferred your own company to any of your kin.

  But once this kind of ambition had got hold of Jolly, it only grew. We’d catch the prospectors’ camel and any friend traveling with him, and we’d broaden our work north and east, maybe even get a freight contract with the railroad, summon George from California. I reckon you didn’t like the sound of any of that.

  Neither did Trudie. I was patching a roof leak the night before we were set to go out and try for these so-called wild camels when she came down from the house to hold the ladder for me. I was awful wary of dropping something on her head, but she didn’t even look up whenever some clay gob peeled off the end of my blade and went sailing past her. “That’s Filip for you,” she said after a time. “Two years gone, he didn’t dream he’d ever be laying eyes on another camel. Now only three will do.”

  “He’s just excitable. I don’t reckon we’ll find any.”

  “Even if you don’t, it’ll be something else soon enough. Anything to keep him called away.”

  “I’m sure that’s not his thinking.”

  She looked up at me. A great believer in points made by silence, Trudie. I started to wonder if she ever intended on letting me climb back down.

  “Don’t you reckon he’s done more than enough wayfaring for one lifetime?”

  I didn’t—but then it turned out I didn’t know shades of Jolly’s early days like she did. I didn’t know he’d been called “happiness” by his mother for only a few short years before he was stolen away from her. Or that Jolly believed, but couldn’t be sure, that it was his father who’d done the stealing—though he traveled with strangers a long time before he realized his father no longer numbered among them. Afterwards, the only thing his old people and his new ever agreed on calling him was “captive”—and when he’d had his fill of that and earned by pilgrimage the right to be called Hadji, the cousins he’d left behind called him traitor, which was what he suspected they’d been thinking all along anyway. Fellow Turks riding with him into Algiers could never quite bring themselves to grant that he was their own, and so called him Izmiri. Only the Arabs called him Turk, and not for very long—for then he came here to be called Arab by everybody, and resign himself to life as Hi Jolly, a name that meant nothing to anyone he’d ever known.

  “It means something to me,” I said, feeling an awful burst of fear. “Ain’t I called him that every day since we met?”

  “I reckon that’s all right,” she said. “He says he don’t call you by your given name, either.”

  But after all that, here her husband was: Filip Tedro once more, rid of his hard-gotten name and so solitary in his devotion to his God that he had hardened around it till it couldn’t be got at by anybody—even if there were anyone to share it with, even if he weren’t the only Mohammedan in the whole world.

  “Why don’t he preach?” I said.

  “He says he’s not learned enough. And the more time passes, the less certain he is of what he knows.”

  “Well,” I said. “What’s there to religion? Following rules and admiring the weather.”

  Her point was: what had all his wayfaring got him that he was so damn keen to keep on with it?

  “Well,” I said stupidly, “didn’t he get you?”

  Trudie frowned. I thought she might shake the ladder. “Well what’s he fixing to do now, save keep right on going?” she said. “You know, my father was similarly disposed. He was a real serious, practical sort, save for one thing—he reckoned the fact that he found himself this side of the Rio Grande the day they redrew the maps was a sign of Providence. And by God, he would reap whatever rewards came on the back of it. He used to say to me, Trudie—have you ever noticed how folks say you’re off to seek your fortune? Not just any fortune—but yours. Your very own. Like it’s out there with your name on it. Well, he sought his in the mines and he sought it in the cardhouses, and in the rail towns, too. And in the end, the only thing with his name on it was the cross we planted him under, a hundred yards from where he was born. But he never stopped wanting after this or that. People get it into their heads that it’s always just around the corner.”

  I felt a little affronted, a little foolish.

  “Well,” I said. “What if it is?”

  * * *

  —

  We did catch two camels the following spring in a dry wash just south of Oso Negro. Both were dromedaries—though smaller than you, thinner and a good deal less agreeable. We had a hell of a time trying to guess their provenance. They were deaf to Turkish and Arabic, and unmoved by any of the commands indigenous to the Beale expedition. Because Jolly believed camels did not forget, he surmised these new recruits must be strangers to us, pack animals brought privately over for work in the mines or bred from that old Beale stock.

  “Imagine if we got two more,” he said.

  I didn’t know about that, but it was nonetheless a much thanklier task running salt with three camels. We got a good bit of money under us, and I’d say you must have welcomed sharing the load after all. We were still going, and the going was good. The journeys were shorter, mere flicks of the wrist on a map from the home we always returned to. And every place we went was something new and astonishing.

  Jolly was still immune to the draw of the cardhouse. He had settled into thinking that whatever riches he would get would be got on his own, no matter what.

  Which was how we came to be hired by the Blacklake expedition.

  * * *

  —

  Mister Frank Tibbert and Doctor Lloyd Beecher came to know us when Jolly and I were working for Rockwell Mining Company of Huerfano. We’d been fo
ur months out in the Chihuahuan desert, about twenty miles east of Bullhead. It was just about the furthest place I could imagine. I’ll be damned if I caught more than an hour of sleep on any given night. Dead miners roamed the streets and the little graveyard on the hill, singing their strangled lullabies. An eastern wind raised oblivion from the desert wastes and swept it nightly over the bowl, and the dust hung yellow between the avenues of tents. Bar-goers slapped it from their hats and thighs as they came into the Santa Sangre saloon.

  One evening this haunted wind blew in Frank Tibbert and Lloyd Beecher: pushed them right through the door and directly to us. Tibbert was a youngish man, short and bearded and fastened into a suit too good for his face. Beecher was huge and smiling. He liked to pretend he was shadowing other people when in fact you could tell in two seconds that anyone in his company was merely his mouthpiece, just as sure as if he’d perched them on his knee. A huge gash bisected his eye—not just the browbone, remember, but the soft of the eye itself.

  “We’re geologists,” Tibbert said. “We hear you’re the people to see about carting precious cargo a long way from water.”

  No man had ever bought five minutes of Jolly’s time by offering him a drink, but my friend couldn’t say no to talk of precious cargo. Three glasses were filled and refilled while they told us their tale: there was a mountain, they said, way out in the Chihuahuan. It had fallen in a burning arc from the sky one evening about two thousand years ago, and in its heart sat the richest veins of gold and quartz anyone had ever seen. The Indians talked about it in their stories, but no civilized person had ever laid eyes on it.

  “We been twelve years trying to reach it,” Beecher said, pressing his big thumbs together. “But we been faced with the insurmountable: there ain’t a drop of water, not within a hundred miles of it.”

  “We’d all but gave up hope,” said Tibbert. “Till we come upon some miners up in Sweetwater County talking about there’s two Turks down this way who got themselves pack animals can go a week without water and carry a thousand pounds.”

  As they talked about the size of the mountain, Jolly’s eyes grew wide.

  “I don’t like it,” I told him when we bedded down. We were sat under that rickety old ramada the mining company had given us to house you, for Jolly scoffed at letting you all sleep untended out here. He was smoking and had that old look in his eye he used to get whenever anyone told him he was the only man for the job.

  “Imagine,” he said. “Being paid in diamond flake.”

  “I been paid in flake. It’s fancy dust.”

  “Where do you think it fell from—the mountain?”

  “I don’t think it fell from anyplace, Jolly. I think it’s a load of horseshit. They’re going to lure us out there and kill us and steal Burke and Charley and Georgie. Amelia’s gone grow up saying my daddy was killed for a falling sky mountain.”

  That gave him pause enough for a while. But day after day there he was, talking to the old-timers who sat around the mines, asking them had they heard of such a place. Most of them had. They’d heard about a glass cliff, too, somewhere up in Wyoming, and a hole in the ground that could bring you out on the other side of the world just like a dumbwaiter. “Geology, my son, is God’s most apparent miracle,” Bright Joe, the oldest man in the camp, told him confidentially. “And ain’t that all we are? Geologists to a man?”

  It was a lot of gilded talk, Burke, and I was suspicious of it. Not because I didn’t want to see—but because that look in Jolly’s eyes, the way he got when people spoke of mineral as though it were the face of the Lord, well it struck me wrong. But then I got to thinking—don’t we all got a thing makes us get that look in our eyes? All of us who ever said, let’s go, let’s go on, who starved for the sight of something new? Perhaps it ain’t the same.

  We left Castle Dome Landing in late September, due west for a malpais that swallowed the sun. We carried two waterbarrels apiece—or should I say, you and Charley and Georgie carried six waterbarrels between you. I think that was around the time you were beginning to favor your left hind a little, and I’d started trying to work out your age. You were getting grumpy and showing more white around your chin. We’d been on the road together a long old while, and of late I had begun to wonder how long a camel might be expected to live. “About thirty years,” Jolly said. Then he smiled. “Or fifty. Depends on the cameleer.”

  Tibbert and Beecher were good enough company. They rode along at the head of the line, stretching out maps and holding up compasses. When they hadn’t killed us by Mesquite, I got to thinking perhaps I’d misjudged them. Perhaps they were only batty stonebreakers after all, as tickled by this adventure as Jolly was, all three of them riding together and pointing at the horizon like none of them had ever seen it before.

  The mercury sat between 105 and 116, so after Tiburon we got to riding only by night. The gray ground stretched flat in all directions. I’d seen deserts before but this was so much itself no living thing could be out here but you. The night was silent save for the thomp thomp thomp of your feet. The slosh slosh slosh of our slowly diminishing water.

  We watered at Huerfano Creek and turned northward for the mountain. It would be six days without resupply, and I remember filling my canteen and thinking about all that desert silt falling into the quiet darkness, and whether we’d be mad by the fourth day and tearing off our clothes and holding each other at gunpoint and gnawing each other’s shins. The canteen gave me no answer; all it showed me were distant mesas. “If I die,” I whispered to you, “you get away quick as you can. You can live anyplace. Go on and on and on.”

  A camel without a cameleer might even make it sixty years.

  Tibbert and Beecher’s horses were whining, wheezing nags who rooted in place sometimes and wouldn’t move for anything unless they were allowed water, and for this chore we had to stop often, which always led to rough words. The days got hotter and the words got rougher. By the fourth day we weren’t speaking at all, just seething along. My mouth got so dry I couldn’t force myself to eat even after I’d watered. We slept in blinding sunlight. Often upon waking I feared I might still be asleep, and so would drink from the canteen, just a little, to get the taste of all those rivers in my mouth and remind myself that Donovan’s want was still with me.

  We came by darkness to the rim of a deep plain, a caldera whose floor was white with snow. “My soul,” Jolly whispered. “God is great.” Well, He was. We went down to the valley floor. What we had mistaken for snow turned out to be salt—thick, glittering whitecaps arrested by the sudden disappearance of some great sea. It was coming on morning when we reached the far side. The whole place flooded with purple light, and as we climbed up the bank I thought I heard the sound of rushing water behind me, and turned. Perhaps you remember it differently—perhaps you will tell me it was a dream, but in the haze of that purple dawn I watched the valley roil, and the waves of that hidden sea returned from shore to shore until we stood looking down on a great, heaving mass of water. Jolly saw it, too. There were tears in his eyes. Not the Pacific, true—but a more substantial sea than anything I had ever dreamed.

  You knelt and I went to the water’s edge and drew back wet fingers. I filled my canteen with those spectral waters. Say what you will of my superstitions, Burke, but I know I did. I carry them yet.

  * * *

  —

  On the sixth day, to much rejoicing, we came upon the mountain. At first it was just a blue shadow, like all the rest of that endless place, but then it firmed up. It was as Tibbert had said: a fist flung from the heavens. While our geologists argued about how to begin, Jolly and I took a turn through the surrounding crater. Little curling plants had taken root in the shale. In the depressions of our footprints, the floor shone white.

  “Just imagine,” Jolly said. “Ours might be the first tracks on this ground.”

  “They very well might,” said I, though I do
ubted it.

  Tibbert and Beecher argued for a whole day, and then another. They set up a ramada to house their beakers and boxes, and they scraped and hammered and peered at the ground. They dug a mysterious hole under the mountain, and Tibbert’s knees could be seen sticking out of it every hour of the clock.

  “Where are the rich veins?” Jolly asked after four days.

  “My boy,” Beecher said, taking him amiably about the shoulders. “Everywhere.”

  “We’d best get some flake off them, then, and soon. It’s many days back to the nearest water.”

  It became very apparent that Tibbert and Beecher, for all their navigational know-how, had failed to properly time this expedition. On the fifth day, their ramada was still up, their boxes full of soil and little scrapings of dirt, and they were standing about with their hands on their hips and pointing at various parts of the mountain. When our water began running out, they got to quarreling with us about the camels. “Can’t we halve their rations?” Tibbert said irritably. “I thought they could go weeks without water.”

  “Days,” I said, and pointed to your sagging hump. “It’s very plain when they start suffering.”