Читать книгу The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir - Susan Daitch - Страница 12

“I have here a dish of ‘mud’ which represents an oleaginous amplitudes of pellets.”

George Herriman’s Krazy Kat

Ignatz to Offissa Pup. March 3, 1940

I STOPPED BY HIS HOUSE the next morning as planned, intending to pack Rostami’s equipment into my rented car, then we would drive out to the foothills together. The house was dark, shutters drawn. His wife let me in, closed the door, but made it clear I was not to sit down or step far into the house. The children were watching television, what sounded like Tweetie Bird in Farsi, in another room. Somewhere between our parting on Fazl Street last night and this morning, he had vanished. Mrs. Rostami put on a headscarf though she wasn’t going anywhere, just opening the door enough, so she could be seen showing me out. She asked me to leave, not in an unkind way, but she was afraid my presence put them all at risk, and I should understand that. Fedeyroon Rostami dismissed Suolucidir as a phantom city, a hoax. She saw me as an American adventurer who had gotten her husband involved in something that should have been left alone. There was little I could do to persuade her otherwise. I had nothing to do with Jahanshah’s disappearance, but my voice sounded feeble and unconvincing, even to myself. She gently pushed me out the door, then slammed it shut.

I drove out to the foothills alone, as I had already done on numerous occasions since I’d arrived. It was blistering hot. Usually I brought adequate supplies with me, but that day, in my despair at certain failure, I’d only packed a small bottle. Jahanshah had had the maps and other equipment for caving in his car. Even after more than a month spent in Iran, no new proof that Suolucidir ever existed had been unearthed. I sat on a rock and stared at the horizon, swatting flies. Soon my water bottle was empty. Though sheep and goats dotted the landscape, no shepherds were visible, but I assumed someone must be watching in the vicinity of the flock. It was a habit of mine to converse with people I met in the region, always hoping, naïvely, that someone would know of a cave somewhere that held untold archaeological riches. I’d gotten to know a few of the inhabitants, since I had some knowledge of the local dialect. They were friendly and eager to talk, share meals, and they tolerated my presence with my jangling tool belt and backpack full of inscrutable objects, even if they secretly believed me to be a crackpot, referred to among themselves as Shovel Man.

One group of goats and sheep clustered around a clump of bushes. That wasn’t unusual in this kind of heat, but there was something desperate about this tight huddle. I went to take a closer look. The reason the animals wouldn’t budge soon became obvious, but the cause was like nothing I’d ever seen before. They were crowded near a crack in the ground from which cold air blew out as if someone had left an enormous underground air conditioner on high, facing straight up into the desert. It was like when you walk past an abandoned building and cold air blasts out onto the sidewalk. I went closer to the edge of the crevice, feeling the cool breeze on my face, when the ground suddenly gave way. I fell maybe fifteen feet, landing on a pile of sand.

How I survived the fall with no broken bones remains a mystery to me to this day. I’d fallen through what must have been the roof of some kind of structure, and just missed crashing into a dozen massive clay jars. There were instances in the past of archaeologists stumbling, falling into sites entirely by accident, like cartoon characters, legs bicycling in air, but instead of turning into a peelable pancake upon landing, they find treasures of Incans or Chaldeans and live to be photographed with their arms around totem and taboo. Standing with difficulty, I gasped as I looked around. Friezes like sandstone filmstrips and very life-like statuary ran the length of the room. Areas where the sand hadn’t drifted over revealed a checkerboard marble floor littered with bits and pieces: small oil lamps, silver coins, flint tools, pieces of colored glass. Had Romans been here? There were even a couple of glazed vessels. Did Crusaders make it this far?

I took a brush from my backpack and whisked millennia of dust from an oil flask. Because of erosion and recent earthquake activity the earth had, after keeping its secrets for thousands of years, kindly shifted, and in the hours that followed, I dusted layers of dirt and sand from a variety of objects, writing notes, quickly cataloging while the sun was high and light fell into the chamber. But eventually the shadows grew longer and a problem presented itself. It would soon be night, the temperature would drop, and I would be stuck on an underground island with no way out, destined to die of hypothermia in the desert. If I couldn’t get back to the twentieth century, the waters would close over my tracks, as if I’d never existed. My flashlight hadn’t been smashed in the fall. I flipped it on and turned its beam down one corridor selected at random. There were passages leading every which way. How was I to get out? No one would survive long in this hole. There were hazards associated with staying in one place and dangers of getting lost in what might be miles of underground corridors that had once been streets.

A phantom Ruth, eager to be photographed with me when news crews arrived on site, who stood by my side at awards dinners, vanished, laughing in a haze of Rambug and snake parts. No, my remains would lie in a heap beside an ashlar to be found, if I was lucky, before the earth collides with the sun. I decided to keep moving.

Down a short stairway, around a corner: mosaics of rams, red calves, fish with golden scales, gilt frescoes worthy of Nero’s palace. High above me the beam of my flashlight illuminated a second bestiary, and among the winged serpents and central sphinx was a creature with the body of a bird, head of a lion, something in its talons that had been worn away.

I scraped dirt from a fresco with the edge of a small spade and then leaned against a lever or pipe of some kind that was flush against a wall. A low gurgling sound could be heard coming from somewhere behind the tile, and suddenly I was drenched by a rush of water, water that hadn’t been turned on in over two thousand years. It was fresh and cold and poured over my head, soaking my shirt and all my equipment. A shock at first, where had the water come from? I was in the middle of a desert. Then the ancient spigot made sense. Mesopotamians developed irrigation, using a series of underground quanat channels and kariz, a network of smaller canals that relied on gravity to transport water, the sources being higher than the water’s destination. The citizens of this place took it one step further by inventing plumbing.

The next hall I entered appeared to have been part of an arsenal. The implements resembled an armory of the comic book heroes my younger Flatbush Avenue self had collected and could have spent an eternity with these objects, making connections, inventing territories, superpowers, and battles. One object resembled the golden trident from Batman’s Blue Devil, a demonic-looking set of mace clubs rivaled those of Hawkman from Justice League, a set of large, formidable hammers reminiscent of Steel’s (from Superman) weapon of choice, and laid against a mottled wall were dozens of notched shields, similar to those used by the Mystery Man, Guardian of Metropolis.

Another series of open passageways led out from the armory, and eventually I came to what must have been a bath house. A mosaic of a bull balanced on the back of a giant fish glittered at the bottom of a pool. The earth was balanced on the horns of the bull, a reference to the Persian myth that explained earthquakes. When the bull grows tired, or in another version when humans overburden the earth with atrocities, the bull shifts the earth from one horn to the other. You would think the result of this action would be that, pierced by the horn, some kind a giant sink hole would dimple the Pacific or Sahara, but the answer is no. Not only did the movement of the bull produce seismic activity, but there were augurers who were called on to predict tremors and seemed to know when the bull had had enough of man’s stupidity.

I passed through the nymphaeum, colonnaded porticos, elaborately carved stone structures, square water storage tanks, stucco houses, all populated by skeletons. While imperial powers engaged in skullduggery and building massive weapons, inconsequential citizens left behind readable footprints, just before they were trapped by some kind of Pompeian catastrophe, or a current of naturally occurring nerve gas floated over the city long before Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot in Sarajevo. Those who stayed behind succumbed: inhale and you sleep forever. This inner part of the metropolis seemed pretty much intact.

The path began to slant downhill, and I had a sense I was approaching the walls of the city, or at least one part of the outer battlements.

At the edge of the city guards posted in towers see the horizon blur and unravel: horsemen, not traders, they decide, traveling in hordes, not caravans. Those on the edge have time to flee. There are no skeletons here. With catastrophe looming, sentries who’d been captured from as far away as Baghdad and Amman escape through the maze and return to their native countries. A nervous jeweler puts emerald chips in his shoes, packs only his chisels and flees in the middle of the night. His neighbor, a perfumer, fills his pockets with vials of attar, saffron, lotus powder, bitter almond oil, and chunks of resin. These scents will always remind him of the city. Along with a mapmaker and his five children, an oil merchant carrying a sack of olive stones, a coppersmith who walks out empty handed, the residents of the outer ring of the city who see and hear more, all depart taking whatever they imagine they’ll need for their new lives. Even if the new lives are empty promises, sketchy at best, and the relics are only to be found scattered around the landscapes after their deaths, no one knows this yet. Those in the center go about their business as if the exodus from the periphery was carried out by delusionals only. They drink their coffee and believe the age of cataclysm is blissfully over. They had no language to fear a Pearl Harbor–like event, so they stayed.

Another path led me in a C-curve from the periphery to the center of the city. Increasingly narrow streets led to an airy piazza, water spewing from the mouths of marble lions and serpents, men and winged sphinxes. Running water, whether dripping from a cornice or gurgling from a fountain, was the only sound in the city; even my footfalls were muffled. I entered one house to find ancient bags of rice, spices, lumps of gum resin, a small ivory camel, and more human bones. As I walked deeper into the phantom city the semi-paved streets began to go uphill, turning into terraces. What would Ruth have done here? Hum the hip bone’s connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone’s connected to the knee bone, and not worry about what couldn’t be known for certain.

Climbing up narrow earthen steps to rooftops, I found storage jars used for wine and oil, a long silver ewer with a spout in the shape of a cheetah. Though not really tamable and now practically extinct, Asiatic cheetahs were used like hunting dogs for chasing wild sheep. People ate on their rooftops, a practice continued by Iranians during Passover. I picked up a thin, battered, wheel-shaped object that crumbled in my hands. Hopping from roof to roof humming the old Mickey Katz song Pesach in Portugal, which turned into Pesach in Peshawar, I must have passed out in some kind of delirium. When I came to under the remains of an archway, I looked ahead to see the city growing more illuminated, as if someone had flipped a giant switch.

A coruscating light seemed to be coming from somewhere, and according to my watch it was now morning on the surface. Walking in the direction of what might have been the source of the sunlight, I turned a corner to find a gap in the earth overhead. The opening was similar to the one I’d fallen through, but it was too far overhead to reach. I was now in an oblong yard, perhaps what might have been some kind of zoo. Elephant, camel, peacock skeletons lay scattered around. I leaned against a small tree that received enough light to grow underground. An elephant rib cage arched overhead a few feet from the tree. If I could climb the bones I might be able to reach a series of roots that threaded the opening and, swinging from those like a subterranean Tarzan, pull myself back out to the earth’s surface.

The elephant’s bones snapped under me. He was old and brittle, not a ladder. I moved some stones to buttress the remaining ribs and tried again. This time I was able to jump from the topmost rib to one of the dangling roots but my hands slipped off it, and once again I landed on my butt. I shouted. Nothing. A beady-eyed goat peered over the edge of the hole, then looked away. I lay on the floor and balanced hunger versus thirst, which should I give in to? I had a handful of salty pistachio nuts in a pocket, but the fountains were nowhere near my present location. Sunlight cast shadows of ancient animal skeletons on the walls. Turning my head I saw the remains of a human body that had not been reduced to a skeleton. Anyone could have fallen into the hidden city. I took a closer look at him. The man was wearing the long shirt, narrow trousers, shawl and turban of a Baluchi tribesman, and glasses still remained hooked to shriveled slices of ear. Due to the dry underground air he hadn’t been reduced to bone, but it was difficult to say what color his skin had been. I took off his glasses and looked at the frames. The engraving on the ear piece was barely legible, but the lettering read Gunst-Optiker, Rosenthalerstrasse, Berlin. Clutched in his hand was what at first looked like a phoenix trampling an antelope. Its human-like head sprouted big ears and horns, sign of its divinity. The creature’s wings were tipped with human heads, mouths frozen mid-roar. I rummaged through his pockets and found, among other things, a visa for Ramin Kosari and a leather-covered metal cylinder, about the shape of a child’s kaleidoscope but larger. I put it in my bag, then pried the phoenix out of his fingers and took that, too. I had read the name Ramin Kosari before. He was the Nieumachers’ guide. His remains were well preserved. He had no broken bones and must have become trapped in the city. I had found Suolucidir.

Twilight approaching, I had about thirty minutes of sunlight left, and then I would be spending the night, if not all the nights that were left to me on earth, with the body and the remains of an unknown number of animals. I leaned against the wall, took a deep breath, then turned so my nose faced the cliff, and tried again. The rocky surface was cracked here and there, enough for tenuous footholds, but I was climbing blind. I felt with my feet as if they were hands and the face of the wall were Braille. Halfway up, I fell again, so I shifted to a section of the cliff I could still see, where more plants grew out of the stone. If desert plants had taken root, then there were cracks in the façade, enough for foot and hand holds — possibly. A stem or stalk meant a root system had been slowly working to crumble stone. As I made my way up I felt for green bits and pieces I could no longer see. Finally, breathing hard, mouth full of dust and pistachios, I managed to shimmy and haul myself out of the city. More than forty-eight hours after my initial fall, I found myself lying on the surface of the earth back in the twentieth century somewhere in the middle of another small herd of goats. They were huddled near another crack in the earth enjoying the cool air that blasted from it, oblivious to the city and its secrets that slept just under their hooves.