Labyrinths (15 page)

The Immortal

Salomon saith,
There is no new thing upon the earth.
So that as Plato had an imagination,
that all knowledge was but remembrance;
so Salomon giveth his sentence,
that all novelty is but oblivion.

      Francis Bacon:
Essays,
LVIII

In London, in the first part of June 1929, the antique dealer Joseph Cartaphilus of Smyrna offered the Princess of Lucinge the six volumes in small quarto (1715-1720) of Pope's
Iliad.
The Princess acquired them; on receiving the books, she exchanged a few words with the dealer. He was, she tells us, a wasted and earthen man, with gray eyes and gray beard, of singularly vague features. He could express himself with fluency and ignorance in several languages; in a very few minutes, he went from French to English and from English to an enigmatic conjunction of Salonika Spanish and Macao Portuguese. In October, the Princess heard from a passenger of the
Zeus
that Cartaphilus had died at sea while returning to Smyrna, and that he had been buried on the island of Ios. In the last volume of the
Iliad
she found this manuscript.

The original is written in English and abounds in Latinisms. The version we offer is literal.

I

As far as I can recall, my labors began in a garden in Thebes Hekatompylos, when Diocletian was emperor. I had served (without glory) in the recent Egyptian wars, I was tribune of a legion quartered in Berenice, facing the Red Sea: fever and magic consumed many men who had magnanimously coveted the steel. The Mauretanians were vanquished; the land previously occupied by the rebel cities was eternally dedicated to the Plutonic gods; Alexandria, once subdued, vainly implored Caesar's mercy; within a year the legions reported victory, but I scarcely managed a glimpse of Mars' countenance. This privation pained me and perhaps caused me precipitously to undertake the discovery, through fearful and diffuse deserts, of the secret City of the Immortals.

My labors began, I have related, in a garden in Thebes. All that night I was unable to sleep, for something was struggling within my heart. I arose shortly before dawn; my slaves were sleeping, the moon was of the same color as the infinite sand. An exhausted and bloody horseman came from the east. A few steps from me, he tumbled from his mount. In a faint, insatiable voice he asked me in Latin the name of the river bathing the city's walls. I answered that it was the Egypt, fed by the rains. "Another is the river I seek," he replied sadly, "the secret river which cleanses men of death." Dark blood surged from his breast. He told me that his homeland was a mountain on the other side of the Ganges and that on this mountain it was said that if one traveled to the west, where the world ends, he would reach the river whose waters grant immortality. He added that on its far bank the City of the Immortals rises, rich in bastions and amphitheaters and temples. Before dawn he died, but I had determined to discover the city and its river. Interrogated by the executioner, some Mauretanian prisoners confirmed the traveler's tale; someone recalled the Elysian plain, at the end of the earth, where men's lives are perdurable; someone else, the peaks where the Pactolus rises, whose inhabitants live for a century. In Rome, I conversed with philosophers who felt that to extend man's life is to extend his agony and multiply his deaths. I do not know if I ever believed in the City of the Immortals: I think that then the task of finding it was sufficient. Flavius, proconsul of Getulia, gave me two hundred soldiers for the undertaking. I also recruited mercenaries, who said they knew the roads and were the first to desert.

Later events have deformed inextricably the memory of the first days of our journey. We departed from Arsinoe and entered the burning desert. We crossed the land of the troglodytes, who devour serpents and are ignorant of verbal commerce; that of the garamants, who keep their women in common and feed on lions; that of the augyls, who worship only Tartarus. We exhausted other deserts where the sand is black, where the traveler must usurp the hours of night, for the fervor of day is intolerable. From afar, I glimpsed the mountain which gave its name to the Ocean: on its sides grows the spurge plant, which counteracts poisons; on its peak live the satyrs, a nation of fell and savage men, given to lewdness. That these barbarous regions, where the earth is mother of monsters, could shelter in their interior a famous city seemed inconceivable to all of us. We continued our march, for it would have been dishonor to turn back. A few foolhardy men slept with their faces exposed to the moon; they burned with fever; in the corrupted water of the cisterns others drank madness and death. Then the desertions began; very shortly thereafter, mutinies. To repress them, I did not hesitate to exercise severity. I proceeded justly, but a centurion warned me that the seditious (eager to avenge the crucifixion of one of their number) were plotting my death. I fled from the camp with the few soldiers loyal to me. I lost them in the desert, amid the sandstorms and the vast night. I was lacerated by a Cretan arrow. I wandered several days without finding water, or one enormous day multiplied by the sun, my thirst or my fear of thirst. I left the route to the judgment of my horse. In the dawn, the distance bristled up into pyramids and towers. Intolerably, I dreamt of an exiguous and nitid labyrinth: in the center was a water jar; my hands almost touched it, my eyes could see it, but so intricate and perplexed were the curves that I knew I would die before reaching it.

II

When finally I became untangled from this nightmare, I found myself lying with my hands tied, in an oblong stone niche no larger than a common grave, shallowly excavated into the sharp slope of a mountain. Its sides were damp, polished by time rather than by human effort. I felt a painful throbbing in my chest, I felt that I was burning with thirst. I looked out and shouted feebly. At the foot of the mountain, an impure stream spread noiselessly, clogged with debris and sand; on the opposite bank (beneath the last sun or beneath the first) shone the evident City of the Immortals. I saw walls, arches, façades and fora: the base was a stone plateau. A hundred or so irregular niches, analogous to mine, furrowed the mountain and the valley. In the sand there were shallow pits; from these miserable holes (and from the niches) naked, gray-skinned, scraggly bearded men emerged. I thought I recognized them: they belonged to the bestial breed of the troglodytes, who infest the shores of the Arabian Gulf and the caverns of Ethiopia; I was not amazed that they could not speak and that they devoured serpents.

The urgency of my thirst made me reckless. I calculated that I was some thirty feet from the sand; I threw myself headlong down the slope, my eyes closed, my hands behind my back. I sank my bloody face into the dark water. I drank just as animals water themselves. Before losing myself again in sleep and delirium, I repeated, inexplicably, some words in Greek: "the rich Trojans from Zelea who drink the black water of the Aisepos."

I do not know how many days and nights turned above me. Aching, unable to regain the shelter of the caverns, naked on the unknown sand, I let the moon and the sun gamble with my unfortunate destiny. The troglodytes, infantile in their barbarity, did not aid me to survive or to die. In vain I begged them to put me to death. One day, I broke my bindings on an edge of flint. Another day, I got up and managed to beg or steal ― I, Marcus Flaminius Rufus, military tribune of one of Rome's legions ― my first detested portion of serpent flesh.

My covetousness to see the Immortals, to touch the superhuman city, almost kept me from sleep. As if they penetrated my purpose, neither did the troglodytes sleep: at first I inferred that they were watching me; later, that they had become contaminated by my uneasiness, much as dogs may do. To leave the barbarous village, I chose the most public of hours, the coming of evening, when almost all the men emerge from their crevices and pits and look at the setting sun, without seeing it. I prayed out loud, less as a supplication to divine favor than as an intimidation of the tribe with articulate words. I crossed the stream clogged by the dunes and headed toward the City. Confusedly, two or three men followed me. They were (like the others of that breed) of slight stature; they did not inspire fear but rather repulsion. I had to skirt several irregular ravines which seemed to me like quarries; obfuscated by the City's grandeur, I had thought it nearby. Toward midnight, I set foot upon the black shadow of its walls, bristling out in idolatrous forms on the yellow sand. I was halted by a kind of sacred horror. Novelty and the desert are so abhorred by man that I was glad one of the troglodytes had followed me to the last. I closed my eyes and awaited (without sleeping) the light of day.

I have said that the City was founded on a stone plateau. This plateau, comparable to a high cliff, was no less arduous than the walls. In vain I fatigued myself: the black base did not disclose the slightest irregularity, the invariable walls seemed not to admit a single door. The force of the sun obliged me to seek refuge in a cave; in the rear was a pit, in the pit a stairway which sank down abysmally into the darkness below. I went down; through a chaos of sordid galleries I reached a vast circular chamber, scarcely visible. There were nine doors in this cellar; eight led to a labyrinth that treacherously returned to the same chamber; the ninth (through another labyrinth) led to a second circular chamber equal to the first. I do not know the total number of these chambers; my misfortune and anxiety multiplied them. The silence was hostile and almost perfect; there was no sound in this deep stone network save that of a subterranean wind, whose cause I did not discover; noiselessly, tiny streams of rusty water disappeared beween the crevices. Horribly, I became habituated to this doubtful world; I found it incredible that there could be anything but cellars with nine doors and long branched-out cellars; I do not know how long I must have walked beneath the ground; I know that I once confused, in the same nostalgia, the atrocious village of the barbarians and my native city, amid the clusters.

In the depths of a corridor, an unforeseen wall halted me; a remote light fell from above. I raised my confused eyes: in the vertiginous, extreme heights I saw a circle of sky so blue that it seemed purple. Some metal rungs scaled the wall. I was limp with fatigue, but I climbed up, stopping only at times to sob clumsily with joy. I began to glimpse capitals and astragals, triangular pediments and vaults, confused pageants of granite and marble. Thus I was afforded this ascension from the blind region of dark interwoven labyrinths into the resplendent City. I emerged into a kind of little square or, rather, a kind of courtyard. It was surrounded by a single building of irregular form and variable height; to this heterogeneous building belonged the different cupolas and columns. Rather than by any other trait of this incredible monument, I was held by the extreme age of its fabrication. I felt that it was older than mankind, than the earth. This manifest antiquity (though in some way terrible to the eyes) seemed to me in keeping with the work of immortal builders. At first cautiously, later indifferently, at last desperately, I wandered up the stairs and along the pavements of the inextricable palace. (Afterwards I learned that the width and height of the steps were not constant, a fact which made me understand the singular fatigue they produced.) "This palace is a fabrication of the gods," I thought at the beginning. I explored the uninhabited interiors and corrected myself: "The gods who built it have died." I noted its pecularities and said: "The gods who built it were mad." I said it, I know, with an incomprehensible reprobation which was almost remorse, with more intellectual horror than palpable fear. To the impression of enormous antiquity others were added: that of the interminable, that of the atrocious, that of the complexly senseless. I had crossed a labyrinth, but the nitid City of the Immortals filled me with fright and repugnance. A labyrinth is a structure compounded to confuse men; its architecture, rich in symmetries, is subordinated to that end. In the palace I imperfectly explored, the architecture lacked any such finality. It abounded in dead-end corridors, high unattainable windows, portentous doors which led to a cell or pit, incredible inverted stairways whose steps and balustrades hung downwards. Other stairways, clinging airily to the side of a monumental wall, would die without leading anywhere, after making two or three turns in the lofty darkness of the cupolas. I do not know if all the examples I have enumerated are literal; I know that for many years they infested my nightmares; I am no longer able to know if such and such a detail is a transcription of reality or of the forms which unhinged my nights. "This City" (I thought) "is so horrible that its mere existence and perdurance, though in the midst of a secret desert, contaminates the past and the future and in some way even jeopardizes the stars. As long as it lasts, no one in the world can be strong or happy." I do not want to describe it; a chaos of heterogeneous words, the body of a tiger or a bull in which teeth, organs and heads monstrously pullulate in mutual conjunction and hatred can (perhaps) be approximate images.

I do not remember the stages of my return, amid the dusty and damp hypogea. I only know I was not abandoned by the fear that, when I left the last labyrinth, I would again be surrounded by the nefarious City of the Immortals. I can remember nothing else. This oblivion, now insuperable, was perhaps voluntary; perhaps the circumstances of my escape were so unpleasant that, on some day no less forgotten as well, I swore to forget them.

III

Those who have read the account of my labors with attention will recall that a man from the tribe followed me as a dog might up to the irregular shadow of the walls. When I came out of the last cellar, I found him at the mouth of the cave. He was stretched out on the sand, where he was tracing clumsily and erasing a string of signs that, like the letters in our dreams, seem on the verge of being understood and then dissolve. At first, I thought it was some kind of primitive writing; then I saw it was absurd to imagine that men who have not attained to the spoken word could attain to writing. Besides, none of the forms was equal to another, which excluded or lessened the possibility that they were symbolic. The man would trace them, look at them and correct them. Suddenly, as if he were annoyed by this game, he erased them with his palm and forearm. He looked at me, seemed not to recognize me. However, so great was the relief which engulfed me (or so great and fearful was my loneliness) that I supposed this rudimentary troglodyte looking up at me from the floor of the cave had been waiting for me. The sun heated the plain; when we began the return to the village, beneath the first stars, the sand burned under our feet. The troglodyte went ahead; that night I conceived the plan of teaching him to recognize and perhaps to repeat a few words. The dog and the horse (I reflected) are capable of the former; many birds, like the Caesars' nightingales, of the latter. No matter how crude a man's mind may be, it will always be superior to that of irrational creatures.