Читать книгу The Cyclist Conspiracy - Svetislav Basara - Страница 15

The Manuscript of Captain Queensdale

I do not know if these lines will ever be read. In their depths, the expanse of the oceans hides objects much larger than the bottle of Venetian glass to which I am entrusting these pages. The ancient books say that those depths swallowed up an entire continent that used to lie between Europe and America. But still, I am writing. If I write down my confession and entrust it to the currents of the seas (at times more conscientious than messengers), there is a hope that, even a hundred years from now, it will reach someone, somewhere. If I do not do this, it is certain that I will carry all I have discovered with me into my grave.

My great fortune came about in the form of a terrible accident. While returning from New England, the ship Invincible, under my command, was caught in an unprecedented storm. The crew threw our cargo overboard in vain, in vain we lowered the sails; the wind and waves snapped the rudder. On the second day (which I thought to be Judgment Day), an enormous wave broke the mainmast like a twig, under which nostromo Bradley met his death, and the next wave carried away three sailors who were rushing to help him. We had no other recourse than to pray to the Lord for the salvation of our souls. There was no more salvation for the ship.

The next day, water began to penetrate into the hold. Rudderless, with no sails, the Invincible was carried ever farther north. The sailors, believing that they had greater chances in the lifeboat, decided to abandon the ship. I could not blame them. They took the remaining stores of salt-cured meat, the last barrel of water, and they set off into the unknown. I doubt that they ever reached shore or that they came across another ship. For, when the sea finally calmed and the clouds scattered, I took the astrolabe and pinpointed the position of the swamped ship, and I realized that the winds had taken us far from any of the trade routes. But that was not all. Shocked, I saw a constellation in the sky that is not noted on any of the charts of the northern skies. I drew the configuration of stars onto the map, although I doubted that my discovery would ever be of service to anyone:

In my youth, I had read in a marine atlas, translated from Arabic, full of the fantastic deeds of Sinbad the Sailor and his company, about a constellation that appears every 365 years, when the year of years is fulfilled, and when the winter of centuries begins in which everything good dies out and the forces of evil grow strong. But, at the time, I could not remember how that constellation from the atlas looked, so that I could compare it with the one above my head. Nor did I have time. Already fairly exhausted, I reached for an ax, some rope and a hammer in order to make a raft. Wrapped in wax-cloth, on the raft I took the ship’s log, a Bible, writing materials, some gunpowder and lead, and at dawn on 12 October 1733, I sailed into the unknown.

One who has never been on the ocean’s expanse has also never experienced the sea of time with absolutely nothing to do. In spite of my desperation (or actually because of it), I measured time using instruments, and every twenty-four hours I carved a notch on the improvised mast, since day and night last for months at those latitudes. At the moment when, not believing my eyes, I spied land through the mist, there were seven notches on the mast. Setting foot on solid land, exhausted and hungry, I collapsed and fell sound asleep. I do not know how long I slept; perhaps an hour, maybe two, maybe two days, but I did not wake up on my own. Someone shook me gently, I opened my eyes and saw three people. One of them addressed me in some language, but I could not tell if it was broken Latin or Old French. To my surprise, when I spoke in English, the man picked up the conversation. I was expecting anything except the presence of a polyglot on such a distant island. But that would merely be the first of my surprises. To be honest, at first I thought that I was dreaming that I was awakened on a remote island by three blond men and that the eldest of them, who introduced himself as Joseph, was telling me that he had seen the sinking of the Invincible in a dream, and my suffering on the raft; that he had dreamt the place where I would land, and that he had come to meet me there. I thought to myself, “All of this is a nightmare; I have had similar dreams before; soon, I will wake up in my cabin on the Invincible, sailing smoothly for Southampton.” But I kept waking up in another place: in a warm hut, on bedclothes made of sheepskin, next to a man who was hovering over me. When the delirium caused by my exhaustion finally passed, it became clear to me that nothing in it had been a dream: I was in an unfamiliar hut, on an island isolated from the civilized world, surrounded by strangers.

Or, perhaps it was all a dream.

One afternoon, Joseph, the elderly man who had found me on the beach, told me the history of the strange community. In the 14th century, a group of laymen and clergymen, led by a certain Enguerrand, a monk named Callistus and Josephus Ferrarius, dissatisfied with the Church steeped in Simony, had accepted an ancient teaching – a heresy begun in Asia Minor at the very beginning of the acts of Christ’s apostles. This original group of master blacksmiths from Antioch sincerely accepted the Gospels, but they also committed a horrible sin. Namely, they undertook the construction of a Mechanical Bird which they intended to use to rise into the seventh heaven. This was the sin of pride. However, because of their unusual spirituality, the blacksmiths from Antioch were not condemned to vanish from the face of the earth. Their spiritual progeny was predestined to play an important role in the history of the world, but also to be exposed to constant exile, torture and scorn.

According to Joseph’s words, they appeared in history again during the iconoclastic crisis that shook Byzantium. Already punished once because of magic and idolatry, they were the most enthusiastic iconoclasts. With the victory of the iconodules, the heresy disappeared from the face of the earth again, resurfacing after three hundred and sixty-five years when the monk Chrysostom found the third of the entire six copies of the secret texts of the Little Brothers and gave it on his deathbed to his pupil, Callistus, who took the secret teaching to Paris where it gained a large number of followers. Using the most conniving of intrigues, the Inquisition accused the most prominent brothers of colluding with the Devil. Callistus, Enguerrand and the Marquis of Rocheteau were burned at the stake, and a small group led by Josephus Ferrarius found sanctuary with King Charles the Hideous. From there, in a boat, led by a constellation which will be discovered only in the future, they reached the most distant Thulae, an island hidden by ice and fog, which I myself had found.

“One hundred years ago,” Joseph told me, “my great-grandfather who, like my father and myself, was named Joseph, just as all the Grand Masters of the order of Little Brothers are called Joseph, dreamed that a castaway came to the island. He left his dream as a testament to his son who improved it, made it more profound and then introduced my father into its secrets. When my father experienced the honor of dying, everything was finished, you were born and it was my responsibility to maintain the whole dream, to dream it anew every night until a few days ago when it finally became reality. We needed you and that is why we created you. In return, you will compose a record of everything you see and learn; our time, the time of the inhabitants of this island has run out; we are preparing to return to our father. Now, get some rest, and when you gather your strength go see everything and ask questions about it all. Then take up the pen.”

“Did it really have to be me?” I asked. “Couldn’t you find a way to hand down your teachings earlier? Did my sailors have to die so that I would come here and try to save your manuscripts?”

“You’re wrong,” said Joseph, preparing to leave, “your sailors had to die because they had to die; they were mortal beings, and the circumstances of death are not important whatsoever. You got here because you had to get here. None of us is able to hand down the teaching because we all know it, and teaching is always passed on by those who are not dedicated to it, but who believe in it. From tonight onward, I will teach you every night in your dreams, and you will come to believe it because you already do. And now, good-bye.”

It will be hard for the one who finds this text to believe its contents. I saw things with my own eyes, but as the Savior said: “Blessed is he who believes without seeing.” Anyway, Joseph tried to convince me that the text will go from one hand to another until it falls into the right ones, because it is not looking for just any reader, but for a certain one. To that unknown person, certainly as yet to be born, I dedicate the pages that follow.

The island itself is not big; it is about ten miles long and not more than three miles wide. At first I thought that was the reason that it remained unmarked on the nautical maps but Joseph, approaching me in a dream, revealed the secret to me. Fleeing from Normandy, the forebears of the islanders kept a copy of the Vulgate and the text The Purgatory of Dreams; they cast their mirrors, weapons and devices into the sea. And without mirrors, watches and swords there is no history; history is, after all nothing but a hall of mirrors in which it is not known which faces are real and which are only reflections.

Without chronology, without history, the island becomes objective insofar as it is the spiritual projection of its inhabitants; it is no less real, no less tangible than Britain, but it lies outside of time and space, or better said in parallel with them, due to the fact that there is no continuous series of events. Thus, I did not reach it, as I thought, by means of my raft, but rather by means of my delirium.

Those are things of which I could not conceive. Not even in the dreams in which Joseph patiently taught me the impossible.

“You see,” he said, “it’s not that difficult to understand. I will use an analogy. Just as America, from where you sailed, did not exist but was rather created by the longing of people for a place where they could extend their exodus to the west, so did our island exist, but it vanished to the senses of the world, because generations and generations of islanders despised space. Then again, it would not be correct to say that America and the island are two different worlds. It’s like when you turn a glove inside out. It remains the same glove except that what was up becomes what is down and instead of the left it turns into the right. At the same time, that is the only possible explanation for your mission. You belong both to the world of America and to the world of the island; you are the mediator in transmitting the secret. That is the real purpose. The description of the situation and of the island is of no importance whatsoever. It’s just a way for all the things we are talking about here to become a part of history. Otherwise, it would all dissipate into nothingness. It wouldn’t even be a fantasy.”

I could swear that, except for Joseph and a couple of other dignitaries, I never saw the same face twice in a row, even though the island did not have many inhabitants. My arrival surprised no one. It was known about for ages, down to the last detail. The smallest of children spoke of the Masters who had died many generations before, and the adults spoke of events that were supposed to happen in the distant future. In great detail they described the assassination of an Austrian archduke in the middle of a Balkan gorge, and with horror they spoke of a great war that would be fought with only one goal: to kill and destroy as much as possible.

From time to time, the patriarchs of old would appear and then just as unexpectedly disappear, but this did not disturb anyone. However, perhaps the most interesting, those people were not sinless, lifeless creatures. Robberies happened, adultery, and even murder, not to mention all the lies that were told. The attitude toward the offenders was interesting. They were not punished, not judged, nor were they despised. On the contrary, they were showered with attention, and they were even envied because, by doing evil, they had obtained the saving possibility of repentance, and thereby the possibility of advancing in their spirituality. These occasional outpourings of evil served to remind everyone of the highest good, God, and so that no one forgot that among created beings none are perfect or without sin.

Still, their graves are the most interesting of all. Placed just along the shore of the ocean, facing eastward, they consist of a series of vertical recesses in which the corpses stand erect, their eyelids half-opened, mummified by the cold in the expectation of that day when the earth and sky will dissolve and when the unimaginable flame of the living God will flood light into the darkness of the human heart. Visits to those graves, scattered among the hills, are the only external manifestation of religiosity I have been able to observe. I have often noticed men and women going to the recess intended for them, getting into them, and practicing their death for hours. Hundreds, thousands of years of solitude that come before the moment when everything will become one.

Before I finish this story and, sealed in a bottle of Venetian glass (a gift from King Charles), introduce it into the fluctuating world of history, I will say something about the language of the island’s inhabitants. At first, it reminded me of the quiet buzz of a beehive and it was completely incomprehensible to me, although it was beautiful. The secret of this language was revealed to me by Joseph, during one of my oneiric lessons. Namely, they speak the words of all languages of the world, the words that made up human language before the disturbance at Babylon, those that the Almighty shattered into a seeming multitude in order to stop evil from becoming perfectly formulated and organized. But for the good, as Joseph said, no words are necessary.

Because, just as resting is perfect movement, so silence is perfect articulation.