The Dark Man and Others, page 2
“I gasped, gaped and blinked. It was the Tower of Babel true to life! Not as tall or as big as I’d imagined it, but some ten tiers high and sullen and massive just like the pictures, with that same intangible impression of evil hovering over it.
“Then as we stood there, from that vast pile of masonry there floated out across the lake that deep resonant booming—close and clear now—and the very cliffs seemed to quiver with the vibrations of that music-laden air. I stole a glance at Conrad; he looked all at sea. He was of that class of scientists who have the universe classified and pigeonholed and everything in its proper little nook. By Jove! It knocks them in a heap to be confronted with the paradoxical-unexplainable-shouldn’t-be more than it does common chaps like you and me, who haven’t many preconceived ideas of things in general.
“The soldiers took us down a stairway cut into the solid rock of the cliffs and we went through irrigated fields where shaven-headed men and dark-eyed women paused in their work to stare curiously at us. They took us to a big, iron-braced gate where a small body of soldiers, equipped like our captors, challenged them, and after a short parley we were escorted into the city. It was much like any other Eastern city—men, women and children going to and fro, arguing, buying and selling. But all in all, it had that same effect of apartness—of vast antiquity. I couldn’t classify the architecture any more than I could understand the language. The only things I could think of as I stared at those squat, square buildings was the huts certain low-caste, mongrel peoples still build in the valley of the Euphrates in Mesopotamia. Those huts might be a degraded evolution from the architecture in that strange African city.
“Our captors took us straight to the largest building in the city, and while we marched along the streets, we discovered that the houses and walls were not of stone after all, but a sort of brick. We were taken into a huge-columned hall before which stood ranks of silent soldiery, and taken before a dais up which led broad steps. Armed warriors stood behind and on either side of a throne, a scribe stood beside it, girls clad in ostrich-plumes lounged on the broad steps, and on the throne sat a grim-eyed devil who alone of all the men of that 14 fantastic city wore his hair long. He was black-bearded, wore a sort of crown and had the haughtiest, crudest face I ever saw on any man. An Arab sheikh or Turkish shah was a lamb -beside him. He reminded me of some artist’s conception of Belshazzar or the Pharaohs—a king who was more than a king in his own mind and the eyes of his people—a king who was at once king and high priest and god.
“Our escort promptly prostrated themselves before him and knocked their heads on the matting until he spoke a languid word to the scribe and this personage signed for them to rise. They rose, and the leader began a long rigmarole to the king, while the scribe scratched away like mad on a clay tablet and Conrad and I stood there like a pair of blooming gaping jackasses, wondering what it was all about. Then I heard a word repeated continually, and each time he spoke it, he indicated us. The word sounded like ‘Akkadian,’ and suddenly my brain reeled with the possibilities it betokened. It couldn’t be—yet it had to be!
“Not wanting to break in on the conversation and maybe lose my bally head, I said nothing, and at last the king gestured and spoke, the soldiers bowed again and seizing us, hustled us roughly from the royal presence into a columned corridor, across a huge chamber and into a small cell where they thrust us and locked the door. There was only a heavy bench and one window, closely barred.
“‘My heavens, Bill,’ exclaimed Conrad, ‘who could have imagined anything equal to this? It’s like a nightmare—or a tale from The Arabian Nights! Where are we? Who are these people?’
“‘You won’t believe me/ I said, *but—you’ve read of the ancient empire of Sumeria?’
“‘Certainly; it flourished in Mesopotamia some four thousand years ago. But what—by Jove!’ he broke off, staring at me wide-eyed as the connection struck him.
“‘I leave it to you what the descendants of an Asia-Minor kingdom are doing in East Africa/ I said, feeling for my pipe, *but it must be—the Sumerians built their cities of sun-dried brick. I saw men making bricks and stacking them up to dry along the lake shore. The mud is remarkably like that you find in the Tigris and Euphrates valley. Likely that’s why these chaps settled here. The Sumerians wrote on clay tablets by scratching the surface with a sharp point just as the chap was doing in the throne room.
“ ’Then look at their arms, dress and physiognomy. “I’ve seen their art carved on stone and pottery and wondered if those big noses were part of their faces or part of their helmets. And look at that temple in the lake! A small counterpart of the temple reared to the god El-Lil in Nippur—which probably started the myth of the Tower of Babel.
“‘But the thing that clinches it is the fact that they referred to us as Akkadians. Their empire was conquered and subjugated by Sargon of Akkad in 2750 B.C. If these are descendants of a band who fled their conqueror, it’s natural that, pent in these hinterlands and separated from the rest of the world, they’d come to call all oudanders Akkadians, much as secluded Oriental nations call all Europeans Franks in memory of Martel’s warriors who scuttled them at Tours/
“‘Why do you suppose they haven’t been discovered before now?*
“‘Well, if any white man’s been here before, they took good care he didn’t get out to tell his tale. I doubt if they wander much; probably think the outside worlds overrun with blood-thristy Akkadians.’
“At this moment the door of our cell opened to admit a slim young girl, clad only in a girdle of silk and golden breastplates. She brought us food and wine, and I noted how lingeringiy she gazed at Conrad. And to my surprise she spoke to us in fair Somali.
“‘Where are we?’ I asked. ‘What are they going to do? Who are you?’
“‘I am Naluna, the dancer of El-Lil,’ she answered—and she looked it—lithe as a she-panther she was. ‘I am sorry to see you in this place; no Akkadian goes forth from here alive.’
“‘Nice friendly sort of chaps,’ I grunted, but glad to find someone I could talk to and understand. ‘And what’s the name of the city?’
“This is Eridu,’ she said. ’Our ancestors came here many ages ago from ancient Sumer, many moons to the East. They were driven by a great and powerful king, Sargon of the Akkadians—desert people. But our ancestors would not be slaves like their kin, so they fled, thousands of them in one great band, and traversed many strange, savage countries before they came to this land.*
“Beyond that her knowledge was very vague and mixed up with myths and improbable legends. Conrad and I discussed it afterward, wondering if the old Sumerians came down the west coast of Arabia and crossed the Red Sea about where Mocha is now, or if they went over the Isthmus of Suez and came down on the African side. I’m inclined to the last opinion. Likely the Egyptians met them as they came out of Asia Minor and chased them south. Conrad thought they might have made most of the trip by water, because, as he said, the Persian Gulf ran up something like a hundred and thirty miles farther than it does now, and Old Eridu was a seaport town. But just at the moment something else was on my mind.
“‘Where did you learn to speak Somali?’ I asked Naluna.
“‘When I was little.” she answered, ‘I wandered out of the valley and into the jungle where a band of raiding black men caught me. They sold me to a tribe who lived near the coast and I spent my childhood among them. But when I had grown into girlhood I remembered Eridu and one day I stole a camel and rode across many leagues of veldt and jungle and so came again to the city of my birth. In all Eridu I alone can speak a tongue not mine own, except for the black slaves ‘—and they speak not at all, for we cut out their tongues when we capture them. The people of Eridu go not forth beyond the jungles and they traffic not with the black peoples who sometimes come against us, except as they take a few slaves.”
“I asked her why they killed our camp servant and she said that it was forbidden for blacks and whites to mate in Eridu and the offspring of such union was not allowed to live. They didn’t like the poor beggar’s color.
“Naluna could tell us little of the history of the city since its founding, outside the events that had happened in her own memory—which dealt mainly with scattered raids by a cannibalistic tribe living in the jungles to the south, petty intrigues of court and temple, crop failures and the like—the scope of a woman’s life in the East is much the same, 17 whether in the palace of Akbar, Cyrus or Asshurbanipal. But I learned that the rulers name was Sostoras and that he was both high priest and king—just as the rulers were in old Sumer, four thousand years ago. El-Lil was their god, who abode in the temple in the lake, and the deep booming we had heard was, Naluna said, the voice of the god.
“At last she rose to go, casting a wistful look at Conrad, who sat like a man in a trance—for once his confounded bugs were clean out of his mind.
“‘Well’, said I, ‘what d’you think of it, young fella-me-lad?* “‘It’s incredible.” said he, shaking his head. ‘It’s absurd—an intelligent tribe living here four thousand years and never advancing beyond their ancestors.”
“‘You’re stung with the bug of progress.” I told him cynically, cramming my pipe bowl full of weed. ‘You’re thinking of the mushroom growth of your own country. You can’t generalize on an Oriental from a Western viewpoint What about China’s famous long sleep? As for these chaps, you forget they’re no tribe but the tag-end of a civilization that lasted longer than any has lasted since. They passed the peak of their progress thousands of years ago. With no intercourse with the outside world and no new blood to stir them up, these .people are slowly sinking in the scale. I’d wager their culture and art are far inferior to that of their ancestors.”
“ ’Then why haven’t they lapsed into complete barbarism?’
“‘Maybe they have, to all practical purposes/ I answered, beginning to draw on my old pipe. ’They don’t strike me as being quite the proper thing for offsprings of an ancient and honorable civilization. But remember they grew slowly and their retrogression is bound to be equally slow. Sumerian culture was unusually virile. Its influence is felt in Asia Minor today. The Sumerians had their civilization when our bloomin’ ancestors were scrapping with cave bears and sabertooth tigers, so to speak. At least the Europeans hadn’t passed the first milestones on the road to progress, whoever their animal neighbors were. Old Eridu was a seaport of consequence as early as 6500 B.C. From then to 2750 B.C. is a bit of time for any empire. What other empire stood as long as the Sumerian? The Akkadian dynasty established by Sargon stood two hundred years before it was overthrown by another
Semitic people, the Babylonians, who borrowed their culture from Akkadian Sumer just as Rome later stole hers from Greece; the Elamitish Kassite dynasty supplanted the original Babylonian, the Assyrian and the Chaldean followed—well, you know the rapid succession of dynasty on dynasty in Asia Minor, one Semitic people overthrowing another, until the real conquerors hove in view of the Eastern horizon—the -Medes and Persians—who were destined to last scarcely longer than their victims.
“‘Compare each fleeting kingdom with the long dream reign of the ancient pre-Semitic Sumerians! We think the Minoan Age of Crete is a long time back, but the Sumerian empire of Erech was already beginning to decay before the rising power of Sumerian Nippur, before the ancestors of the Cretans had emerged from the Neolithic Age. The Sumerians had something the succeeding Hamites, Semites and Aryans lacked. They were stable. They grew slowly and if left alone would have decayed as slowly as these fellows are decaying. Still and all, I note these chaps have made one advancement—notice their weapons?
“ ’Old Sumer was in Bronze Age. The Assyrians were the first to use iron for anything besides ornaments. But these lads have learned to work iron ore, I daresay.’
“
‘But the mystery of Sumer still remains,’ Conrad broke in. ‘Who are they? Whence did they come? Some authorities maintain they were of Dravidian origin, akin to the Basques—’
“‘It won’t stick, me lad,’ said I. ’Even allowing for possible admixture of Aryan or Turanian blood in the Dravidian descendants, you can see at a glance these people are not of the same race”
“‘But their language—’ Conrad began arguing, which is a fair way to pass the time while you’re waiting to be put in the cooking-pot, but doesn’t prove much except to strengthen your own original ideas.
“Naluna came again about sunset with food, and this time she sat down by Conrad and watched him eat. Seeing her sitting thus, elbows on knees and chin on hands, devouring him with her large, lustrous dark eyes, I said to the professor in English, so she wouldn’t understand: *The girl’s badly smitten with you; play up to her. She’s our only chance.”
“He blushed like a blooming school girl. “I’ve a fiancee back in the States.”
“‘Blast your fiancee” I said. ’Is it she that’s going to keep the bally heads on our blightin’ shoulders? I tell you this girl’s silly over you. Ask her what they’re going to do with us/ “He did so and Naluna said: *Your fate lies in the lap of El-Lil”
“‘And the brain of Sostoras” I muttered. ‘Naluna, what was done with the guns that were taken from us?*
“She replied that they were hung in the temple of El-Lil as trophies of victory. None of the Sumerians was aware of their purpose. I asked her if the natives they sometimes fought had never used guns and she said no. I could easily believe that, seeing that there are many wild tribes in those hinterlands who’ve scarcely seen a single white man. But it seemed incredible that some of the Arabs who’ve raided back and forth across Somaliland for a thousand years hadn’t stumbled onto Eridu and shot it up. But it turned out to be true—just one of those peculiar quirks and back-eddies in events like the wolves and wildcats you still find in New York State, or those queer pre-Aryan peoples you come onto in small communities in the hills of Connaught and Galway. I’m certain that big slave raids had passed within a few miles of Eridu, yet the Arabs had never found it and impressed on them the meaning of firearms.
“So I told Conrad: Play up to her, you chump! If you can persuade her to slip us a gun, we’ve a sporting chance”
“So Conrad took heart and began talking to Naluna in a nervous sort of manner. Just how he’d have come out, I can’t say, for he was little of the Don Juan, but Naluna snuggled up to him, much to his embarrassment, listening to his stumbling Somali with her soul in her eyes. Love blossoms suddenly and unexpectedly in the East.
“However, a peremptory voice outside our cell made Naluna jump half out of her skin and sent her scurrying, but as she went she pressed Conrad’s hand and whispered something in his ear that we couldn’t understand, but it sounded highly passionate.
“Shortly after she had left, the cell opened again and there stood a file of silent dark-skinned warriors. A sort of chief, whom the rest addressed as Gorat, motioned us to come out Then down a long, dim colonnaded corridor we went, in perfect silence except for the soft scruff of their sandals and the tramp of our boots on the thing. An occasional torch flaring on the walls or in a niche of the columns lighted the way vaguely. At last we came out into the empty streets of the silent city. No sentry paced the streets or the walls, no lights showed from inside the flat-topped houses. It was like walking a street in a ghost city. Whether every night in Eridu was like that or whether the people kept indoors because it was a special and awesome occasion, I haven’t any idea.
~ “We went on down the streets toward the lake side of the town. There we passed through a small gate in the wall—over which, I noted with a slight shudder, a grinning skull was carved—and found ourselves outside the city. A broad flight of steps led down to the water’s edge and the spears at our backs guided us down them. There a boat waited, a strange high-prowed affair whose prototype must have plied the Persian Gulf in the days of Old Eridu.
“Four black men rested on their oars, and when they opened their mouths I saw their tongues had been cut out We were taken into the boat, our guards got in and we started a strange journey. Out on the silent lake we moved like a dream, whose silence was broken only by the low rippling of the long, slim, golden-worked oars through the water. The stars flecked the deep blue gulf of the lake with silver points. I looked back and saw the great dark bulk of the temple loom against the stars. The naked black mutes pulled the shining oars and the silent warriors sat before and behind us with their spears, helms and shields. It was like the dream of some fabulous city of Haround-al-Raschid’s time, or of Sulieman-ben-Daoud’s, and I thought how blooming incongruous Conrad and I looked in that setting, with our boots and dingy, tattered khakis.
“We landed on the island and I saw it was girdled with masonry—built up from the water’s edge in broad flights of steps which circled the entire island. The whole seemed older, even, than the city—the Sumerians must have built it when they first found the valley, before they began on the city itself.
“We went up the steps, that were worn deep by countless feet, to a huge set of iron doors in the temple, and here Gorat laid down his spear and shield, dropped on his belly and knocked his helmed head on the great sill. Someone must have been watching from a loophole, for from the top of the tower sounded one deep golden note and the doors swung silently open to disclose a dim, torch-lighted entrance. Gorat rose and led the way, we following with those confounded spears pricking our backs.
“We mounted a flight of stairs and came onto a series of galleries built on the inside of each tier and winding around and up. Looking up, it seemed much higher and bigger than it had seemed from without, and the vague, half-lighted gloom, the silence and the mystery gave me the shudders. Conrad’s face gleamed white in the semi-darkness. The shadows of past ages crowded in upon us, chaotic and horrific, and I felt as though the ghosts of all the priests and victims who had walked those galleries for four thousand years were keeping pace with us. The vast wings of dark, forgotten gods hovered over that hideous pile of antiquity.
