Hal Duncan, page 44
I think it was the smell of the place, an acrid chemical smell that assaults the nostrils the deeper one goes into the caves. It seems absurd, for it is nothing like that stench of putrefaction I can never quite eradicate from my dreams; nothing could be like that. I don't know why it should affect me so. But I wonder if it was just the fact I couldn't place it. Rotting metal, petrol fumes, boiled blood, sulphur or ammonium, I swear it smelled like all of them and none of them.
If that smell is natural, then Nature is no mother.
A Little Skin and Bone
2 April 1921. Hobbsbaum has lain the skin out on a slab of rock to study it. It is a macabre scene, this antechamber of rock all carved with arcana, lit by the flickering light of all the lanterns gathered round the slab where Hobbsbaum scrutinizes the flayed human hide like some doctor of another age giving an anatomy lesson to his students. His finger moves like a scalpel, tracing the patterns; I watch him as he runs it down the skin from throat to groin then pauses and follows another course of script across the empty chest ¯a travesty of a Catholic blessing.
He is convinced the black spirals and circles, lines and dots, the whole delicate tracery of geometric convolution, is some kind of writing. I cannot believe him. I cannot believe the monstrous creatures that created the abomination in the caves beneath our feet were capable of anything other than the most barbarous atrocity. I will not believe. I shudder even as I write these words.
The men are also in deep shock. It is quite understandable, I suppose; these men are simple souls, fighting lads, and while they are like me, I'm sure, no strangers to death, the sight of it on such a scale and in such an inhuman, alien manner can only be disturbing to them. I think of an old Arab guide outside a tomb in the Valley of the Kings, refusing to go one step further, making signs to ward off curses. But I think also of his son, laughing at his superstition and beckoning us inside. Painted grave, he said dismissively. Dead king-Much gold. He understood something his father didn't, that in the end it was just desiccated flesh inside, however splendidly adorned.
A grave is a grave, no matter whether the corpse is in a gold sarcophagus, a linen shroud or a khaki uniform, whether it's laid to rest with salt and natron, or formaldehyde, or simply flowers and mud. But that is no grave beneath us.
Hobbsbaum buries his feelings in his intellectual curiosity, though I can tell that he is not entirely unmoved. Pechorin alone seems unaffected by the sight of Kur. He is a pitiless reptile of a man. He stands behind the professor, looking over the tattooed skin as if it were a map to some lost treasure, a map that only he could read. He and Hobbsbaum speak quietly in lowered voices.
3 April 1921. The state of preservation is incredible. The conditions in the cave are strange, granted, but even those foul vapours could not suffice to cure the skin so well. These people must have had some preservation techniques far beyond even the pharaohs. I am beginning to wish that they had not, that the skin that lies before us had rotted and been forgotten, that these madmen had left not one single trace behind them ... that we had never come to this hellish place. It is affecting us.
22 September 1942,13:05:
¯ Do you feel it yet?
¯ Feel what, Mr Carter?
¯ The eyes of your men on you. Accusing you. Hating you for bringing them to this hellish place. I remember what it felt like. I—
¯ I feel nothing. You are mistaken.
¯ You don't feel. .. unnerved?
¯ By a little skin and bone. Nothing to ...
¯ A dozen corpses from another expedition. Looks like it happened only yesterday.
¯ Be quiet!
¯ Of course. Words are dangerous.
[A long silence]
¯ Tell me what happened to your party.
¯ We cracked the code.
The Illustrated Men
4 April 1921. We ruled out alphabet and syllabic systems immediately and the writing is quite certainly neither hieroglyphic nor pictographic. These curves and dots are so abstract, so fluidly geometric, that, after such a time, fifty years of study would hardly render them less inscrutable. But Hobbsbaum refuses to leave until he's found the key to it. Admittedly, I am myself strangely transfixed by the illuminated skins. There is something ungraspably recognizable about them, something that niggles at the back of the mind as when you see the face of someone that you might have known in your schooldays or back in France, but no matter how you try you cannot place it. You know that you should know them but you cannot for the life of you think why.
I have been thinking ...
One of the skins brought out by Pechorin's men from deep within the Kur, I am convinced, is a map of the constellations in the sky, as they would have been in those times. But rather than linking the stars together to make animals or artefacts, as classical astrologers did, these seem as abstract as the writings on all the other skins. A few of them are carved on the outer cave where we have set up camp, with Proto-Arattan annotations that may well be translations, attempts by later visitors to represent either the meaning or the name of these constellations. Again in these transcriptions we find abstraction, ambiguity, as if each 'constellation' symbolized some concept, some idea. The more I think about it, the more I see these maps as code-books, dictionaries for the language.
6 April 1921. Each symbol is a line of force. I'm sure of it. They represent not things, not objects but events, shifts, forms of power in motion ¯ not a cave-lion, say, but the arc of its pounce, the scything swing of its claws. Not a bird, but the flourish of its wings as it takes off. I am convinced that the tattoo script is not composed of words, or syllables, or even letters, but of phonetic elements, the changes of the airflow, the shape of the tongue.
When I talked to Hobbsbaum he seemed stunned, but nodded, smiled an idiot grin. Pechorin could have killed me with his look. But he nodded. I know I'm right. There's a power in these symbols, almost hypnotic. Even as the three of us talked, the idea came together. The symbols signify the places and the manners of articulation ¯ plosive, fricative, approximant, and so on ¯ and shifts between them, voicing qualities, pitch, rhythm.
Now it is only a matter of understanding the system. We may not know the actual meanings but if the system is as simple as it looks, then we can reconstruct the words of the language well nigh exactly as they would have been pronounced.
But the longer we spend here in this place, the more unnerving it becomes. What with the skins scattered all around us like some ghastly version of a Bedouin tent floored with fine-patterned rugs, it is as if we've brought the atmosphere out of the inner chamber, broken the boundary between the world of the ancients and our own. The cave is womb and tomb combined, the dark earth we were born from and to which we must return, in death, in dreams. It is the chambers of our mind, fit by the fire of our Promethean schemes.
Is this why we have become disorganised, I wonder, no longer cataloguing each skin one-by-one, but acting more like absent-minded scholars rifling through their own library. Hobbsbaum strides between the things, from one to another, cross-referencing this symbol with that, with the markings on the cave walls, excitedly mumbling to himself, yes, yes, of course. And I find Pechorin more suspicious by the day; I even overheard him muttering to one of his men, This is the history of our people. It belongs in Russia. The Ossetian only blinked and gave him a blank stare. He wants to leave. Now. I can see him polishing his bayonet and thinking about how to get away from here. With Hobbsbaum buried in his work, he notices nothing of this. I must be vigilant.
The Command of Fear and Fury
22 September 1942.1 caught Carter and Pechorin scheming together in some obscure Caucasian sing-song dialect that both speak with fluency. For a second something prevented me from simply ordering them to cease. Was it the beauty of the words alone that caused me to stop, to listen as they speak? When I questioned them, they insisted their conversation was of little consequence and for a moment I believed them, as if each word was crystal truth, perfect in itself, a line of force. I forgot all my doubts and suspicions.
Damn them. They are hypnotizing me as they have hypnotized the men, turned them against me. Eicher actually approached me today to 'express the fears of the men'. I cursed him for a coward and a traitor. He bowed his head, but he muttered under his breath as if I couldn't hear him. Carter turned to me, like there was no-one else around and said, They don't have the guts to whisper among themselves yet, but they will.' I could have killed them all when he said that.
23 September 1942, 02:00:
¯ You said before that words are dangerous. Why do you fear them? Why do you wake up screaming in the night?
¯ You know. You've seen the bodies that I dream about.
¯ They wanted to leave. They mutinied, tried to take the skins to sell to the highest bidder. They had to die. What is there in that?
¯ Pechorin's story, his story, not mine. I say they killed each other.
¯ Why would they do that? Why?
¯ [indistinguishable]
¯ What did you say?
[Carter laughs]
¯ What did you say?
¯ You know, I'm not entirely sure I can translate it, but I'll tell you this: I said it in a language old as stone and harder still, one that sounds inside you like a chord of music, reverberates, snakes itself through your head and heart, the blood and guts of you, and carries a meaning right into your soul.
¯ What did you say? I couldn't make out what you said. What was that word?
-You really want to know. I'll whisper it in your ear, Herr Strang.
¯ What did you find in the skins? What did you learn? What was that word?
¯ We found a complete phonetic script so precise, so perfect, that to read it was to hear the words inside your head exactly as they would have been spoken fifteen thousand years ago, to hear the concord and discord between articulations, every harmony and clash of stress and intonation. The challenges and exclamations, the pleading, the menace, the hatred, the horror. How about you, Pechorin, old chap? Don't you remember it?
¯ Enough.
¯ You speak this language. Both of you. You will teach it to me.
¯ I can't allow that, old man.
¯ Carter. Enough. There is no need for this. You should take your men and leave us now, Herr Strang. You would be well advised.
¯ How dare you—
¯ Need? No need, Pechorin? You know there is. You brought us here. You hear it in his voice too. You can't help it. For twenty years you've heard the need in the voices of everyone around you, everything they were feeling, even what they masked to themselves. For twenty years you've been notating it into that damned script, somewhere at the back of your head, and reading it. Feeling it write itself across your soul.
¯ There is no soul, Englishman. Only the will. You know this just as I do.
¯ The will to power. Yes. The command of fear and fury. That is the nature of this tongue, yes? This is how you've turned my men against me. The two of you. You're working together. You've always been together.
-You're a damn fool, Strang.
-You will teach me this language. You must.
¯ Listen to you, Strang. Listen to the tone of your own voice, the pressures, the tensions, the strain. You have no will! You bully, you plead, you whine. You couldn't speak the language even if you tried.
A Cold, Inevitable Logic
12 April 1921. Pechorin shot the two Brit soldiers today, ruthlessly and without sanction, for suggesting that the supplies were low and needed restocking. He said they'd questioned his authority. The strange thing is that when he said it, I agreed with him. I knew exactly what he meant, exactly. I felt the same cold bite of hatred and disdain, could have killed them both myself. Perhaps it's only that I knew they were deserters. I should not let my contempt for men like that affect my judgement. I begin to appreciate his position, in command of such a mob; peasants with guns, all of them. How long before they all turn bolshevik?
13 April 1921. Progress on the translations is amazing. Working, as a start, on the principle that the circles represent lip-rounding, we began applying other such ideas to commonly occurring signs. Curves appear to show the shape of the tongue, or the flow of air over the tongue. The peak of the curve would therefore define the place of articulation. Smooth and wavy lines might represent voiced or voiceless sounds, even creaky and whispering voices. Hobbsbaum thinks the relative positions of these lines may even represent the tone of the sound, the musical pitch. He says it is like sheet music for a Wagner opera.
A 'voiceless' sound, as the term is used in phonetics is not silent, rather it is produced with the glottis wide open rather than flapping so that the sound does not have the humming, buzzing quality of a 'voiced' sound ¯ the /b/ sound, for example, is produced in exactly the same way as the /p/ sound, except that the /b/ is voiced, while the /p/ is voiceless; likewise with /d/ and /t/, /g/ and /k/. I have been learning some of this phonetics, as I travel in my grandfather's footsteps. Little parts of the translations begin to make sense to me now; I can hear them in my head. The writing itself, the language itself ¯ it is inside my head now. I know what they must have been feeling, what they must have been thinking and I'm glad I'm travelling alone.
Pechorin:
Strang begins to see the world the way that Carter and myself do. From the few phrases Carter has muttered at him, already he begins to sense the sound of buried emotions in voices, the shapes and shifts of the psychology behind an utterance. Fears and desires. I believe Carter plans to kill him. I know he is capable of it, and it has a cold, inevitable logic. We will not leave here, although we could, because we do not want to. In a way the three of us are now one side of the equation and the soldiers another. We all know that they stay only out of fear, under threat of death; the only language these fascists know is the language of intimidation.
Ten seconds ago, Carter leaned over my shoulder to read what I had written and said, 'Maybe we should teach them another.'
The Stenographer
25 September 1942, 02:30 hours, Kur.
¯ Fury. I could feel it as you said the word. I heard it. I knew it.
¯ Can you hear the echo, here, in your gut?
¯ [Interrogation disrupted by commotion outside]
¯ Sturmman. Go outside. Send them away.
¯ [With forceful certainty] Herr Strang, I cannot do that.
¯ Tell them to go to hell. They forget who is in command.
[My hands shake as I type this. I do not know why.]
¯ I am under orders, Herr Strang. Everything on paper. You yourself—
¯ I am in command here. [Strang walks to canvas partition, throws it back.] I am in command here! [He walks outside. More voices. A gunshot.]
¯ [Pechorin, out of sight] Let go of him now. The next time, I kill you. You understand me?
¯ You will all obey this man. He has my authority.
¯ [Carter laughs. He is looking at me.] He has his own authority.
¯ You will listen to him. You will obey him. Or I will have your rank, your uniform, your name, your number.
[I have to write this all down. This is my function. This is my only function. But I am a simple man and all I pray for is my safe return to Hamburg, to beautiful Hamburg. What is happening to us here?]
16 April 1921. What if you found a language that sent information like a gun sends bullets, direct to the heart? What if you learned how to decode it, but you couldn't read the content, didn't know the exact definitions of the words, only their import, their function as emotive triggers? What if you knew that someone else, though, knew exactly what it meant, every word, every phrase? What if they were writing it down in notes, that ancient language, transcribing page upon page of that archaic tongue?
What if you had gathered together a book out of the skins of the dead, and somewhere in that book were all the words that never should have been said, the secret meanings that no one was ever meant to hear? What if, when someone spoke to you, you knew exactly how they felt about you, the distrust, the fear, the envy? The things best left unsaid?
What if you could hear that in your own voice, every doubt, every vanity? What if you could hear the latent racism in your words, could feel the ... discord of it, but still feel it, as a soft, pink scar? What if you could hear your own reflection, sense your own echo inside? This is the language of the fallen angels that we're learning how to read. This is the language broken in Babel, born in Hell.
[Sounds of an argument ¯ angry, resentful, self-pitying, loathing.]
¯ We will break you.
¯ [There is a quiet warning in Carter's voice] Pechorin.
¯ I will break you.
¯ Pechorin. It doesn't have to happen again.
¯ Sturmman Macher. Silence the prisoner.
-Sir?
¯ Do it. Use a knife. Cut his tongue out.
¯ Damn you all. Macher, sit down and [He says something I cannot transliterate].
¯ I ¯ Sir ¯ I—
¯ Let's end this now, Pechorin. Let's end it all, right now. You want to hear a word of real power, Strang?
¯ [cursing, invoking] hyawve [?] ¯
We are in Hell.
