Читать книгу The View from Tamischeira - Richard Cumyn - Страница 7

Whenever I am able to free myself from the obligations I owe my constituents, which is as often as possible without inviting censure, I travel abroad. Travel is crucial to the growth of the complete person. Vast distances and novel sensations scrape calcified deposits from the complacent ego, exposing it to the infinite strands connecting people, rocks, plants, and animal life on this shrinking orb. Invariably I return with fresh insight into particular difficulties on these honoured isles, after seeing how it is that another culture identifies and rectifies problems similar to ours.

Thus from the Chinese I learned how they could feed so many people on so little, and based on my findings while in the Orient I devised a nutritious diet of cabbage, potatoes, and whole-grain bread with added chalk as a calcium source. From a shaman of the Brazilian rainforest I learned about the extraordinary healing powers of various herbs. The aboriginal peoples of Arctic Canada are able to live comfortably in frigid temperatures in rounded shelters built wholly of ice and snow, leading me to wonder this: if such a simple material can be harnessed there, might we not have overlooked a similarly abundant resource in England to help alleviate the housing shortage in our burgeoning cities? In this regard, putting aside all thoughts of leather-lunged wolves and poorly prepared pigs, my mind lit upon the potential of straw as a building material. And yet, taking nothing from the richness, the exhilaration of these my previous excursions—across the arid Sahara, through the jungles of wildest Borneo, along the newly uncovered cobblestones of long-lost Roman towns—I can say without reservation that until my voyage to the fabled land of the Transcaucasus, I had always returned to Westminster and to my constituency office fundamentally unchanged.

My transformation was due in no small part to the majesty of the Caucasus Isthmus, a wild and beautiful girdle of land extending from the Black Sea in the west to the Caspian Sea in the east and bisected along that same axis by a range of mountains second only in grandeur to the Himalayas of Nepal. Had chance not given me the travelling companions it did, when it did, I believe I would be addressing you, Dear Reader, in a form not unlike that of my previous travel accounts. You would have open before you a reliable printed guide to one of the far-flung places of Earth, where countless strange languages survive in the hills and valleys, where blood feuds rage, sapping the populace of vitality for generations, and where hospitality afforded the stranger is unequalled. Rather, with the trip still warm and tumultuous in my mind, all my known moorings torn away as by a typhoon, I take the unprecedented liberty of exposing not only the deeds but the motivations of my companions as far as I am able to discern them. It is an incomplete, perhaps a never to be completed task. I know that I will never plumb the depths of Professor Reginald Aubrey Fessenden’s extraordinary scientific mind, nor will I ever feel the intensity of the love between the poet, Archibald Lampman, whose ghostly presence I felt at all times despite the fact that I had not nor would I ever have the pleasure of his acquaintance, and Miss Katherine Waddell. Of the three, she is the one I think about most often.

The tsar had recently improved the Georgian Road connecting Europe and Asia, and it was my intention to follow it and to be open to any adventure that might befall me along its dark, winding path across the Caucasus Mountains. Although I am and will remain a pacifist, I can appreciate the effort with which Russia, having only the blunted Urals to call mountains, chose to fight so ruthlessly to secure this region. No doubt to control this most strategic and easily blocked route to the Orient, the Russians had established strict rules governing the use of the road.

When I arrived at the tariff office in Vladikavkaz that morning, they were there ahead of me, he in his mid-thirties, imposing, impatient, indignant; and she, younger, sitting as if she were going to have her photograph taken. In the little Russian he knew, he was trying to make himself understood to the officer on duty. The tariff, as much as I could make out, was excessive. He and his companion, who was seated on a bench against the wall and looked more than mildly amused, would not pay the toll, he said. They could not do so and still afford food and accommodation along the way. The officer assumed that the woman was his wife; I could tell by the way he ignored her, an insulting failing of these outpost bureaucrats who had long ago lost their courtly St. Petersburg manners. I could also tell from the traveller’s accent that he was not European, and his lack of aplomb in the situation proved that he was most definitely not British.

I did not hesitate to introduce myself and to put at their disposal the services of Sergei Borshelnikov, my guide and interpreter. Fessenden introduced himself as a professor of physics and electrical engineering at the University of Pittsburgh. Miss Waddell was from Ottawa, Dominion of Canada. The levy in dispute was four kopecks per horse per verst for the entire journey, a distance of 201 versts. We agreed to share a four-seated carriage, the cost of which worked out to be about £12, and since my publisher had allowed me that much and more for this particular expense, I offered to cover the tariff myself. Fessenden protested, although weakly. I could see that he was as tired as his companion, and that he was distracted, as if persecuted by an inner voice. The last leg of their journey, by train and steamer from Vienna to Odessa and thence to Vladikavkaz, had been a long, exhausting one with many delays. They had found accommodation for the evening in a modest inn in town but had been kept awake most of the night by a raucous wedding celebration that seemed to involve every room but their two. I, on the other hand, had sailed from Piraeus, where I had been vacationing for a month, to Istanbul, and from there across the Black Sea to Varna, Kustendje, and Sebastopol, and thence to Novorossik, where I boarded the overnight train that runs eastward across the isthmus, arriving refreshed that morning. It was the least I could do to provide some assistance to two fellow Argonauts.

We inspected photographs of the available types of vehicle and selected a carriage that looked to be a cross between a Landau and a Brougham, with a folding top and a longer and sturdier yoke shaft than normal. It was built for four horses, with an extra horse tied on either side of the carriage, an especial arrangement meant to address the dangers of the Dariel Pass. Motor cars were not yet allowed for fear that the noise of their engines would cause rock slides and snow avalanches.

Covering our laps with thick blankets, we seated ourselves comfortably and tucked the lighter of our bags around us. The driver put the bulkier luggage into the boot at the rear of the carriage. We began with the top down. Sergei and I sat with our backs to the driver, affording the professor and Miss Waddell a view of the landscape as it unfolded. In truth, for the first part of the journey, I was content to see the vista reflected in the faces of my new acquaintances.

Reginald Fessenden and Archibald Lampman were friends at Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario, Canada, and they maintained a correspondence until Lampman’s death in 1899. After taking a degree at the University of Toronto, Lampman taught school in Orangeville, Ontario, for two years and then accepted a position in the Post Office Department in Ottawa. Predictably he found the desk job to be dull and repetitive but not altogether taxing and a fair sight better than school teaching. Anything was better than that for a man with poetic aspirations.

The schoolroom, he wrote, placed a man exposed as a freak of culture and knowledge and longing. The little “homunculi,” as he called his charges, citizens in embryo, could not for the life of them understand why they or anyone should be excited about words and numbers and ideas. He tried to infect them with his passion. He read to them from his messy notebooks and ink-smudged manuscripts all tattered at the edges and bound with string. He recited William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, even slipped them Walt Whitman when he was sure no one in authority was listening, and still the little savages remained impervious, ignorant of what to tell their parents about singing the body electric. Doubtless they would not have remembered the song, the singer, the point, the day, the time, the place or the weather. He felt that if he were a spring, his water might well have been pouring into a room full of sieves. Such was the character of the town, a place of stout, industrious, practical men who wanted their children to fear God, do right, accept the sanctity and redemptive quality of work, and spurn frivolity. To them a forest was uncut lumber, a stream a source of mill power, frogs overly noisy in summer, dragonflies evil-looking, and faeries not to be believed in.

For Lampman frogs were the voice boxes of the gods, while faeries pushed and pulled on every lever of wilderness. To speak and write in a way that made words dance to their own inner music was divine. And from the wellspring of idleness came peace, abiding joy, and the very reason for being alive.

In their defence, his students believed that the schoolhouse was prison, that action, regardless of how rash or ill-planned, outweighed expression, and that he was the source of their frustrations. On the same day that he caned a boy, not so much for his insolence as for his evident contempt for the contemplative life, Lampman wrote his letter of resignation to the school board.

A month later he was in Ottawa. What had his friend Duncan Campbell Scott told him about the capital city? Bundle up, even in summer, he had warned, for this was a town without time to have grown a radiant heart. They would gradually help her find her soul, but it would take some time. She needed music, theatre, poetry, and scientific enquiry. Bytown, as it was originally named, was a veritable vacuum awaiting such nourishing society as they could supply. They vowed to change that rough lumber town from one of the dark places of Earth to one of light.

I turned to the professor, remembering the location of his tenure. “Pittsburgh! Surely there is nothing in Pittsburgh but slag heaps and Vulcan stithies,” I teased, trying with my quip to catch the young woman’s eye. I was unsuccessful, for she sat gazing dreamily into the rugged streets of the town, her arms folded protectively across her breast.

Fessenden assured me that Pittsburgh balanced the bustle of its steel industry with a refined community of educated sophisticates who valued art, music, theatre, science, and moral enquiry. At the last item listed Miss Waddell emitted a short, explosive “Ha!” although it could just as easily have been an expression of shock or pain at the roughness of the road. She moved her body perceptibly away from her seatmate, and I wondered as to the nature of their relationship. She seemed barely able to tolerate him, but she was no captive of the journey, surely, for she held herself upright, her chin thrust forward in a resolute fashion, her eyes actively seeking the road and the passing sights. She was here of her own accord, I was certain, as much the controller of her destiny as was the esteemed inventor and teacher seated beside her.

I have, since returning from my travels in the Caucasus, read much of the poetry of Mr. Archibald Lampman, sent to me by a friend and bibliophile in Boston, Massachusetts, and have been able to compare my memory of Katherine Waddell with the poet’s portrait of her in verse. An undeniable verisimilitude resides in those verses. She was tall, as tall almost as Fessenden, who stood at least six feet in height and whose girth gave him the appearance of great physical strength. And she was “slender,” and “grey-eyed,” carrying herself with both a “noble grace” and a “conscious dignity.” All this was true of the woman with whom I came to be acquainted so intimately but who, I realise, I knew not at all. Some flame of her identity is missing, I believe, from Mr. Lampman’s picture of her, although he had sought assiduously for it: “Life to her / Its sweetest and its bitterest shall reveal, / Yet leave her a secure philosopher.” Close, close. The young woman I met that day in September 1902 did reveal an aspect of the philosophical in her bearing, a touch of the ascetic, perhaps, a weariness about her eyes, “mobile and deep,” that came from a loss more profound than that of a few hours of sleep aboard a confined train.

Before long we had passed the outskirts ofVladikavkaz and found ourselves in the countryside following an almost imperceptible climb southward through gently undulating foothills. The road began to twist and turn now, pulling ever nearer the distant snow-covered range, while beside us the River Terek surged in a torrent. The air had a late summer tang to it of honeysuckle, dry pine, and hay.

As he published his findings in various scientific and engineering journals, Fessenden posted his friend the articles to read. In a letter dated 1893, Lampman thanks him for sending a recent article in Scientific American. He found it surprisingly clear. He didn’t know if he would ever completely grasp Fessenden’s theory concerning the transportation of sound over great distances through thin air. The poet thought himself too much a creature of his senses, confessing that what he could not see or touch he found difficult to conceive. Nature herself was supernatural enough for him. It seemed a contradictory statement, I thought, given his belief in faeries and the like.

On Fessenden’s recommendation, he read Ancient Fragments by Professor Cory at Princeton, and another book by a man named Mead. Since their days at Trinity, they had become fascinated by a single problem, which was to locate the Pillars of Hercules marking the entrance to the waterway leading to Colchis and Eden. The textual evidence seemed to indicate that the sons of Seth had settled in Egypt or thereabouts, and at first Fessenden was convinced that the Pillars, if they still existed, would be found there. Lampman, on the other hand, doubted that Egypt was the place to search. If I have it right, he reasoned that the flooding of the Nile River, being an annual event, brought with it the fertilising silt that is such a boon to agriculture there. Josephus, he argued, described the descendants of Seth as being naturally of a good disposition, happy, remaining true to their faith, and free from evil. Like the Babylonians, they made careful studies of the heavens, and lest the knowledge of their science be lost, they recorded their discoveries on two columns or stelae, one of brick and the other of stone.

Lampman maintained they were happy because they were far enough away from the place where the Deluge had occurred, and that the stelae they erected in Egypt must have been copies of ones lost to them after the Flood. If Josephus had meant that the original Pillars of Hercules were in Egypt, wouldn’t he have said so? The poet believed that the survivors of the Flood and their descendants took with them, along with the habit of building recording columns, an abiding fear that the catastrophe would be repeated. He wrote that his “friend” at work, Miss Waddell—he had mentioned her to Fessenden in previous letters—believed that the stelae were symbols of the sexual potency that was probably universally lost for a period of time due to the psychological trauma associated with the overwhelmingly destructive force of the water. A most provocative woman.

But returning to the question, what then had the two amateur archaeologists proposed? A happy but cautious people enjoying prosperity and an expanding scientific knowledge in a new land, yet wary enough of a repetition of a cataclysmic event, something awful from the deepest recesses of memory, that they made a concerted effort to record their knowledge upon indestructible columns, one of brick which, should it be washed away, had a twin made of stone. Fair enough, but where were these monuments now? Lampman pondered. Were they under the sands of the Sahara or somewhere much farther away? Fessenden thought his friend’s intuitive approach laughably unscientific, but something vague still told the poet they were looking in the wrong part of the world for the Pillars of Khur-Khal.

Out of a sense of hospitality, being the assumed host given the circumstances of our meeting, I tried to put my companions at their ease by recounting the details of a recent trip I had taken to the Punjabi region of India. Sergei, who had joined me at the Bosporus, made no pretence of hiding his boredom and promptly fell asleep. Miss Waddell appeared to warm to me or to the situation in general, and encouraged me with the occasional nod or exclamation of wonder. When I related a story of a young wife who chose to immolate herself on the funeral bier of her husband, her eyes grew wide.

“How horrible!” she cried, almost the first words she had volunteered since we had set out together, but from her tone she was anything but horrified. She shifted her weight forward, causing the fur wrap covering her upper body to slip—the air was decidedly icier now as the height of our ascent became evident—and she revealed two things immediately. The first was that she was the type of person who is fascinated by death. I can pick out such a one from a group of twenty people in a trice: he or she gazes for great lengths of time into the distance at no single point on the actual horizon, not the perfect silhouette of Mount Kasbek, say, which we were approaching, nor the sheep-dotted foothills, but longingly toward a point of inner ceasing. It is the look of one made ill by love. The second revelation was that she was holding to her bosom a square wooden box roughly the size of Fessenden’s large hand, and that this item she considered as dear to her as her life. A sense of decorum prevented me from asking her directly what the box contained or why it was she guarded it so closely, and so I directed my attention instead to the professor, asking him whether he had some specific business or research that brought him so far from America.

“Where to begin. Do you know your Bible, Mr. Norman?”

I confessed to knowing only enough to get through the Anglican service without any of my constituents thinking the less of me for it.

“My father was an Anglican minister. By the time I was seven, he made sure I knew my Bible lessons better than I knew my flora and fauna. ’In the beginning was the Word.’ Now I have always considered the word of God to be truth. It has to be, or where do we find ourselves? Putting the word of God on par with the word of man would make the former a variable, unreliable communication. Wouldn’t you agree?”

A natural sense of diplomacy led me to nod a vigorous assent. I am not a thrice-returned Member of Parliament by mere chance. The way Miss Waddell was now contemplating her lap and sighing, however, assured me that she held a contrary opinion, and suggested that this was a discussion—an argument?—that they had had before.

“I must warn you, Mr. Norman, that the good professor likes to set intellectual traps.You have successfully avoided his first one. Similar pitfalls remain, however. For example, you are familiar, of course, with Mr. Darwin’s theories contained in his Origin of Species?”

I was, and told her so, although I declined to admit that all I knew about Mr. Darwin’s theories of evolution of life on Earth came from the synopsis my parliamentary secretary had prepared for me. Your humble representative, Dear Reader, is expected to assimilate more written matter in one session than the average person could possibly read in a lifetime.

“Then using logic and the evidence collected by your five senses—you do have all of your five senses intact, do you not, Mr. Norman?”

I assured her that I did, ceding to her sudden playfulness by asking her to call me Henry. How could someone be so distant one moment, so coy and provocative the next?

“Common sense alone would lead you to the singular conclusion that Earth and all life we see upon it today could not have been created in six days.”

“Again you misunderstand what I mean by Truth,” Fessenden said, no small edge of annoyance in his voice. “The ancients did not make up stories except about that which they could not have experienced. Clearly the creation of the world and the universe was something they had missed seeing by a few billion years. Their belief was in an omnipotent creator. Even today, in this new century, who of us can look about in wonder at the complexity of life and not believe in God? Dress the Deity how you will, we return always to this question of origin. I believe that we must honour the beliefs of our predecessors, and that to fail to do so is to lose touch with our origin, wherein lies our very humanity. To the ancients, a creator who could make so miraculous a planet as this must have been a being that could do it in the blink of an eye, let alone in the span of a week. I repeat my earlier assertion: the ancients held storytelling—and by that I mean fictionalizing—in low regard. Why would one make something up? Was that not lying? Look at the suspicion with which Plato regarded the artist in Greek society. Seeing the first performance of a play, his esteemed relative, Solon, collared Thespis backstage afterward and scolded him for depicting events that had not actually happened. In essence, he condemned the actor for telling lies in public.”

Miss Waddell took advantage of a pause in his argument and addressed her rebuttal not to Fessenden but to me, as she might to the Speaker of the House during Question Period. “Water into wine, blind beggars given their sight, the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, the dead brought back to life—tell me these are not stories, expressions of desperate hope, even downright lies stretched into miracles by the overwrought imagination. The hysterical need to believe can be a powerful creative force, as the psychoanalysts have shown.” How completely did she take us in with her false counterpoint!

“No, this are miracles, simple and plainly,” said Sergei, who had roused, and who may have been playing possum all along. “Please, otherwise, where is Church? Where is faith, et cetera and et cetera?” Her puppet, her ventriloquist’s dummy.

“The New Testament is practically modern history,” Fessenden said, ignoring him. “By the time John dipped Jesus in the River Jordan, the imagination in human discourse was blossoming. Some of the best novels were being written by the later Greeks. What I’m trying to make you see—”

“Either we believe in Bible or we are not with God. Nothing else is possible,” insisted Sergei, a quick-tongued, proud, but simplistic Georgian who was maddeningly pigheaded. I saw the divergence of their three points of view, their inability to find common ground on which to stage the discussion, to be my cue to bring it back to my original position.

“You are in the Caucasus for theological reasons then, Professor?”

“A scientific enquiry into the origins of certain recorded events. Biblical, yes, but similarly to be found in the traditions of many ancient cultures, all of which valued truth-telling above all else!”

“Point made and taken,” said Katherine, about whom I was thinking in a more familiar way now ever since I had urged her to use my given name. “We’ll have to start calling you Reg the Sledge!” He winced, whether under the heat of her criticism or because of the familiarity of her address—the same intimacy I now hoped for—I could not be certain.

“Archaeological in nature?” I asked.

“Yes,” Fessenden said, “although I haven’t the time or the money this trip to do any sort of intensive digging. Should I find what I believe is buried at various spots in this region, it would surely be the result of happy chance. No, it is simply that for years in my spare time, usually late at night after I have finished working in the lab for the day, I have been reading ancient texts and poring over a variety of maps. I reached a point at which either I would see this land with my own eyes or close the books and roll up the maps forever.”

Archibald Lampman suffered from a weakened heart and lungs, the result of a childhood illness. Fessenden remained solicitous of his friend’s delicate constitution throughout their correspondence. He was glad to read in a letter that Lampman had recovered his strength, and that his government job was not so odious as to distract him entirely from his writing. A foray Lampman and his literary friends proposed to take into the wilds of Algonquin Park, Fessenden wrote, filled him with no small amount of envy. At that point in his career he was one of Thomas Edison’s leading chemists and would have welcomed the chance to extricate himself from the laboratory for a few days to accompany his friend on such an invigorating outing, but the work there would not wait.

They were still debating the location of the Pillars of Hercules. He thanked Lampman for his thoughts regarding Thoth, who by the poet’s reckoning was the first Hermes. They were still left with the problem of geography, that is that their sources, Manetho the Sebennyte in particular, were writing in and about Egypt. By his own account, Fessenden writes, Manetho copied inscriptions engraved on columns erected by Thoth in the Seriadic Lands, which were generally agreed to be somewhere in Egypt. After the Flood, these inscriptions were transcribed from hieroglyphic characters into Greek, written down in books, and deposited by Agathodaemon, son of the second Hermes and father of Taut, in hidden chambers of the Egyptian temples. The chambers are described in Ammianus Marcellinus as “certain underground galleries and passages full of windings .”This writer says that they engraved on the walls of these chambers “numerous kinds of birds and animals and countless varieties of creatures of another world.” Fessenden found that last bit—creatures of another world-—intriguing. Most likely, he pointed out, Marcellinus was referring to beasts of the African jungle.

He agreed with Lampman that Taautus of Egyptian and Phoenician mythology was probably the same as Taaus of the Babylonians, and that Taut and Thoth were possible derivatives of the same name. He was probably Theos of the Thracians. The name means “The One Who Does Things for the Spirits.” I think of a private secretary or executive to the gods. Was he Hermes the messenger? Perhaps, thought the inventor, who wrote that he would need more evidence than they had at hand to accept that the land of the Seriad and the Pillars of Hercules were anywhere but in Egypt.

The carriage slowed almost to a halt, and the professor was interrupted by a sudden explosion of sound: deep, savage barks from an apparent pack of wild dogs, veritable wolves, that flung themselves at the auxiliary horses. Their muzzles were drawn back to expose lethal, snapping teeth, and their ears lay flat with alarm against their heads. Still more of them lay panting by the side of the road, and ahead of us blocking the way—I turned and peered around the driver’s back—was a stream of sheep and goats being herded toward us in no great hurry. They stopped when they saw the carriage and parted only when they had to, when it was clear they should give way or be trampled by the shoes of our horses. The shepherds, two older men and a boy, raised their hands in greeting as we approached them but could do little to help speed our way. Their faces were sunburned the colour of darkly oiled wood, and they wore long, earth-tone mantles that covered them neck to toe, and on their heads, pie-shaped felt caps. In his hand each carried a long staff that looked to be twice his height.

“Why don’t they move out of the way?” Katherine asked.

“Is no hurry,” Sergei said. “Besides, is no place to go.”

Indeed, close by on our left was the river, and on our right the start of a wall of rock that towered above us. The increasing roar of the Terek in its confinement was punctured at times by the shepherds calling to their flock with a piercing, high-pitched cry.

“Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin travelled this way,” Sergei said, “along very same road. Of course, road has been improved since then. ’We hear muffled roar and catch sight of Terek spewing forth in directions severally. Too noisy almost, the waves turning wheels of low Ossetian mills which looking like are houses for dog.’ There,” he said, pointing, and we saw one of the very same structures in the water. From a distance it resembled a child’s miniature. “Pushkin saw Turkish prisoners— this is 1820, 1830—working on road. Being writer, greatest poet like Goethe and Shakespeare, he cannot pass by without talking to them. Like you, Mr. Norman—I am shocked you do not make interview with these shepherds for writing your book. You are quiet writer, like all English, quiet and proper. Turkish prisoners complain to him about food is given to them. All day is Russian black bread. They cannot getting used. This is making Pushkin think of friend—I cannot remember name—just returned from Paris. He is so sad. ’There is nothing to eat there,’ he says. ’Nowhere could I get black bread!’”

He guffawed at his joke and slapped our knees. Finally we saw the last set of double-curled ram horns and fat, twin bustles on the hind ends of the sheep, and heard the final raucous bleat of the evil-looking, vile-smelling goats, and got our speed up once more. After a dozen versts, we arrived at a stone building that looked more like a garrison than a way station. The air felt even colder without the stream of animals to wade through, and the thought of bread made me feel suddenly famished.

Fessenden drew a long cylindrical leather case from under his seat and removed the cap from one end. From it he took a rolled map, which he began to unfurl, but because the wind was gusting crazily here and because he needed a flat surface upon which to spread it, he made quickly for the door ahead of us. So intent was he on seeing where we were in our journey that he seemed to have forgotten that a lady accompanied him. To make amends for his impetuous lack of gallantry, I went ahead to hold the door for Katherine and for Sergei who, as he drew near, feigned a blow with his fist to my midsection.

“You must upkeep your defencelessness, Mr. Norman! Is no Marquis of Roxbury rules here, I am frightened to say.” And he laughed again from his belly. I did my best to ignore him.

It is not to exaggerate the point to say that Archibald Lampman shone a light upon the hitherto dim corners of his friend’s mind and made him reconsider certain assumptions. As much as it pained Fessenden to admit it, Lampman may have been right about the location of the Seriadic Lands. In fact, the scientist was newly excited about the possibility of filling large gaps in the Puzzle, and all because of a shift, led by Lampman’s uncanny intuition, in focus. To be precise, a shift northward. It was something Archibald had been hinting at for years, ever since he called attention to the very simple fact that although the Nile flowed from the south to the north, the ancient Egyptians grounded their entire cosmology in an east-west orientation. The mountain peak behind which the sun rose on the longest day of the year; the corresponding peak behind which it set on the shortest day; the mountain above which the sun stood at noon mid-year—where were these markers in Egypt? Or in Greece, for that matter? Or in what was then Babylon? Not there. Or, if indicated, they paled against the description of the original myth as recorded by the ancients.

He writes that he was looking at Eusebius again and was thinking about what the ancient scholar said about the Cabiri: “These things the Cabiri, the seven sons of Sydyk, and their eighth brother Esmun first of all set down in memoirs as the god Taatus commanded them.” Fessenden discovered that “Sydyk” means “pointing up to the sky” and was the name given to an ithyphallic monument. The sons of Seth may well have built the stelae. Fessenden’s Stieler’s Hand Atlas, plate 49, page 19, locates a Caucasian village called Pssydache (Sydach) right in the centre of the eyot between the Terek and Sunsha Rivers in the upper Alizon Valley. This may well be the location of one or both of the lost columns.

Fessenden made another etymological point: “Seirios” until late meant the sun itself and not the star. “Seriadic,” then, might mean the country of the sun (Seirios). It might mean the country of the lasso users (seira). Or it might mean the country of the Seres. The kingdom of the Seres was near the mouth of the Hypanis River, now called the Kuban. Some think the kingdom extended across the entire Caucasus Isthmus from the Black to the Caspian. This, according to a fragment of Euripides’ Phaeton, was Asiatic Sarmatia, the land of Ur (Apollo), the place where he stabled his horses. And according to Liddell and Scott, a “seira” was a line with a noose used by the ancient Sagartians and Samaritans to entangle their enemies, and was still employed today in the region. The north Caucasus, being ruggedly mountainous, was probably not thought of as the land of the sun. Hence all the more reason for them to look south of the range.

Inside the station house we were able to procure a meal consisting of spiced sausage, kippers, and goat’s milk cheese, with the ubiquitous black bread and a copious supply of vodka and wine. We helped ourselves to the buffet after Sergei spoke to the proprietor, making it clear that I would be the one paying the bill, and we sat ourselves around a plain but sturdy wooden table. Through a small window I could now see a queer grouping of animals that I had missed on arriving: of all things, a camel stood passively among a flock of chickens, ducks, and geese.

The professor had already covered the table beside us with his maps and was hunched over them, his spectacles flipped onto the top of his head and his face drawn to within a hairs-breadth of the top page.

“Reginald has a remarkable facility in one of his eyes. When he brings it close to an object, the eye takes on the power of a small microscope. I don’t doubt he can see into our very souls.”

The vodka had evidently liberalised Miss Waddell’s manner as well as her tongue. She seemed more relaxed and happier but was displaying also a mask of irony that I found distasteful. What circumstances had brought these two to such a level of brusque intimacy that one could be so taunting and the other so tightly closed to her provocation? They had not known each other well before coming together on this trip, of that I was almost certain, but yet they shared a distant connection. Was it a place, a person, an event? My ability to discern disharmony between two people is a skill I have honed from long hours of observation, while sharing the compartment of a train, while lounging on the deck of a steamer, and while sipping coffee in town-centre plazas the world over.

Fessenden tolerated Miss Waddell’s presence, but only just. He was searching for something long-lost; a glance at his onionskin maps, overlaid one upon the other and forming semi-transparent strata several layers deep, told me so. The charts were ostensibly of this region: the boundaries of the Caucasus were there, the Black and the Caspian Seas, the mountains. But different areas were coloured variously and these had gentle, approximate curves rather than the precise, jagged edges of territory carved out by war. I made out the words Amazon and Aedon, and the top left corner of one of the pages was covered by what looked to be page references from such sources as Strabo and Herodotus.

“Although I can’t for the life of me think what it is he can see on his beloved maps—he’s made them all himself, you know—when he peers that closely. Fault lines? Tiny little men? Solomon’s mines deep, deep under the ground? Sergei, would you be a dear and bring me another cup of this lovely turpentine?”

“Too much wodka, dear lady, is not so gentle upon stomach. I fetch you some wine instead.” Sergei was as smitten with her as I was. Only the scientist appeared not to care if she was well or ill. He must hardly have tasted his food as he wolfed it down while moving his focus back and forth between the charts and a notebook he had drawn from his overcoat pocket. This, I realised, was the intense concentration, at the expense of all social niceties, that leads to great invention and discovery. This ability to block all distraction is something I confess I cannot do, for I thrive on the bombardment of stimuli from the outside world. I am a sponge for it, a dog in a field of daisies running hither and thither from bee to bird to burrow.

Sergei went to speak again to the keeper of the station, a bushy-bearded man with arching eyebrows and a full, taut belly, about tapping some of the dreadful Circassian wine that they store in sewn ox hides, entire skins minus the head, bloated with the bitterly fermented liquid. To draw a draught, one unties a cinched foreleg and the monstrous fluid gushes forth like blood. As long as he hid the nature of the wine’s container from her, Sergei might have done well to woo the young colonial lass. But what was she doing here? What did she carry in that box that never left her sight? I considered warning her not to guard it so conspicuously, for then it might be made the target of one of the many thieves who populate the region. Jewels perhaps. An heirloom. Or keepsake letters from her many admirers, love-struck Canadian cowboys and woodsmen.

In Ottawa the relentless arctic blast held the hellish frozen city in its grasp, and Lampman prayed for relief. It was so harsh, the air like ice spears piercing his lungs, that he had to swaddle his face in layers of scarves before venturing the few blocks to work. While he trudged up Metcalfe Street, he warmed himself with snatches of his favourite verse, and with thoughts of the myth lands and the possibility that they could be, of all places, in the Caucasus.

Of all the connections Fessenden had posited thus far—present-day Terek with Erech of the Gilgamesh epic, the Dariel Pass with Erebus, Sekhet-Eli with Sakatley—it was the Alizon Valley with Eden that had a lock on his imagination. To stand upon that ground, in the lee of the mountains, and to see the Garden as the ancients remembered it, to visit such a place once before death was his abiding wish. Perhaps the grip of winter had him thinking obsessively about balmy climes. But, no, it was not that alone. For all Fessenden’s insistence upon reproducible, “hard” evidence, as the inventor called it, and upon logic, Lampman found himself sharing his friend’s excitement for discovery, for the reality underlying the myth. As he walked home at the end of the day, or in the mornings as he ran beside the Rideau River to try to build up his wind, he would think about the journey and the itinerary when they arrived. From Sevenfold Erech of the Wide Plazas, none other than Tartarus itself with its race tracks and encircling canals, he travelled south in his mind the thirty miles to Dariel, and through it, fearful, blind in its terrible blackness, he would feel his way, the voice of the Terek his only guide until it debouched at Eshmuti, the opening to the Alizon Valley.

He had familiar landmarks in Ottawa that he associated with the Puzzle. The Byward Market east of Parliament Hill was Semochada Scheni, for it seemed that whenever he was there, surrounded by the bustle of greengrocers, butchers, poulterers, fishmongers, the crowds, the surging vitality of it, the skies were always bright. It was his Sun City, a warm oasis trapped in a heart of ice. It was Phanagoria and Phoeni and Fenkhu, all one. He wrote of a promontory overlooking the Ottawa River, which height he took to calling Bakhu, the Mountain of Sunrise, because one night he and Katherine sat there conversing until the easterly sky began to blush. The fields to the east of the city were Sek-het-sasi, for in his memory they always flamed with those first rays of the joyous day. He called a little white church where he and his love often stopped on their noontime walks, To-neter, the “Holy Land,” not for its altar and hymnbooks, but for its simple pews that afforded them rest, and especially allowed them to sit close enough that they felt the conversant warmth of their bodies. For without love, he wrote, paradise is unobtainable.