Tales of Adventurers (21 page)

Between the shunters and the drivers the military were compelled to take a little promenade. As for us, the visitors, we argued courteously and from an academic point of view; but it was not
difficult to see that strong words would be used if we permitted ourselves to take the affair seriously. The Resistance man had already described Mme. Delage to the General Manager in terms for
which I had to persuade him to apologize.

No one noticed the man with the wheelbarrow. He arrived unobtrusively. He was so much a part of France that one did not question his right to be in the railroad yard. He was a little old
peasant, bent by labor in the fields, and with the long, gray mustache of an ancient Gaul. He was wheeling a barrow with a ladder on it.

He stopped at the tower and looked benevolently at Grande Vitesse, who was on the roof counting bunches, and at Petite Vitesse, who was performing the feats of an acrobat through the window. He
knew at once that their intentions were honest – they understood each other, those children of old France.

“They are just right, my grapes!” said the ancient, rubbing his hands. “Ah, how I know you! You have not changed in the war.”

And he patted the trunk of the vine as if to congratulate it upon so punctual a response to the season.

He was quite unaffected by the crowd. I doubt if he even noticed us. Or perhaps he thought that we had come to watch. He had the face of a man who enjoys all the protection of his conscience and
the law. I hastened to his side before everyone could speak at once.

“Is it your vine?” I asked him.

He sat down on the wheelbarrow and drew from his vast coat pocket a portfolio. The documents were imposing. They dated from the time of Napoleon III. Paper like that is not made nowadays. And he
read them aloud, on and on – that the said Sieur Henri Duval sold to the railroad company the property as set forth in the accompanying schedule with all buildings and land and produce
growing thereon with the exception of the said vine, and the said Sieur Henri Duval should have access at all times for the purpose of cultivating the said vine and the fruit of the said vine
should belong to him and his heirs and assigns, and the said railroad company on their part –

“I am François Duval,
voyez-vous,
” he declared, “son of Henri Duval, and I have here my birth certificate and copy of the will of Henri Duval.”

“But it is plain the grapes are his!” grumbled Charles Cortal, who, you will remember, was a communist, and did not believe in private property. “Why worry about the damned
documents? He can just as well leave them for us in the tower.”

He shrugged his shoulders and strolled off to prepare Lulu for the road. We returned to Paris.

H
E CRAWLED OUT
of his sleeping bag and shivered in the Persian dawn until the sun rose in countable inches above the flat
edge of the salt desert, and the temperature leapt up as if there were no atmosphere at all to soften the transition between night and day.

It was a Martian, not an earthly landscape. In such barren immensity he was conscious of his truck, his only companion, as if he were seeing it from the air. It was an indiscernible brown spot
at the foot of a brown mountain. There was no green by which its shape and unity could be remarked – and this in spite of the fact that a narrow channel of water roared between truck and
mountain. The stream itself was barren. Bed and banks were smooth as those of an aqueduct. The speed of the water had cleaned the rock of every obstruction where gravel might accumulate and soil
grow into life.

He had intended, when he left Ispahan, to turn his back on that stream after filling his water tank, and to drive two hundred miles into the heart of the desert – an easy enough run over
the baked, glistening surface, but foolhardy for a man alone. On foot and carrying water, the point of no return was fifty miles out; thus an injury, a breakdown or an unexpected patch of soft
ground might well mean death from thirst or exhaustion. Two men, however, could have dealt with pretty well any emergency that was likely to befall a fifteen-hundredweight truck in first-class
mechanical condition, with ample spares, water, petrol and wire netting in the back.

It was mere bad luck that he was alone. Aslan, his tough Turkoman servant and driver, had gone down with dysentery. And that, if you like, was a marvel, considering that Aslan, for the better
part of his life, had eaten nothing that had not been tasted by fourteen thousand flies before him, and had taken no harm. But there it was. Aslan had been left, weak and cursing, in the care of a
friendly village headman, and Gwynn had gone on, telling himself that he would just reconnoitre the approaches and would not risk the journey.

Laurence Gwynn was no passionate pilgrim for wealth or far horizons. He did not look a man likely to be alone in deserts, for he was slight and fair-complexioned and by no means in his first
youth. His manner, even towards his truck, had something of indecisive courtesy. This, however, was only a conscious and easy adoption of the standards of the East, and it concealed a thoroughly
Western honesty of purpose. He was a consultant geologist, and he knew Persia as well as any European, and a great deal better than any native Persian. He didn’t claim to love the country,
but he readily admitted that it never bored him. He had reached a point of content, as in some successful
mariage de convenance,
whereat it was impossible to distinguish between love and
continual interest.

Curiosity – and at that a curiosity more personal than scientific – was the motive tempting him to take the jeweled road of salt crystals which led straight into the rising sun. Yet
the story of the hill and its rocks that gleamed in darkness was nothing but a bazaar rumor. So, at least Gwynn told himself – repeatedly – as he tried to ensure the victory of caution
over curiosity. Bazaar rumors flared up with the speed of epidemics. The scrap of knowledge was always present, like the typhus, but nobody bothered to recollect or to express it. Then, one noon
under the arches, a whole street would discuss some fact that was perfectly familiar to their fathers, and embroider it with lies until, instead of truth with no publicity, they had publicity with
no truth.

The Russians had taken the rumor seriously, and dispatched, with what they hoped was secrecy, an old-fashioned expedition. They were right, of course, to use horse transport. You couldn’t
report on possible routes and water supplies and geology from a plane. Gwynn considered this Russian excitement quite absurd. It confirmed, however, his own opinion that there was enough truth in
the story to give an object – and no more – for a couple of weeks of pleasurable exploration.

The gap between horizon and red sun grew to a hand’s breadth, and the stab of warmth, instant and relentless, was as keenly appreciable as had been, ten minutes earlier, the bitter cold of
dawn. Gwynn’s common sense triumphed without more ado. It was folly to go on. There was no point in adding to the loneliness of that lonely desert.

He let down his canvas bucket into the river, and washed and breakfasted. The taste of fruit, coffee and fried bacon reminded him that he was out for his pleasure, and that danger was not at all
a necessary spice. He stowed his gear, and followed the river up its valley along a track worn by the hooves of herds and pack animals that had come down to the edge of the desert and moved along
it until they could strike northwards again into the hills.

Some ten miles up the ravine, the mountains drew away from the river, and rock and dust changed into soil. There were crops and a village. There were even trees – a line of slender poplars
by the water, apricots in the terraced plots around the houses. It was a harsh, windswept, isolated site for human habitation, but its people, for Persian villagers, were by no means poor. They
lived at a forbidding distance from government and the taxgatherer.

Laurence Gwynn perceived at once, by the slight constraint that greeted his arrival, that there must be another stranger in the village. When he came to the open space of beaten earth by the
village watering place, the elders were flurried as some hostess greeting a visitor of unexpected distinction at her own quiet party. They instantly surrounded his truck, revealing, though not
isolating, the former center of attraction.

On the communal bench, beneath the scanty line of poplars, sat a Negro. He was wearing a dented but carefully polished helmet which had once belonged to a trooper of the Horse Guards. His body,
dressed in the remnants of European clothes, was slung about with oddments – a water bottle, an old messtin, a primus stove, a cluster of small and dirty jute bags, and a pair of shining
cymbals. His gigantic, black, boat-like feet were bare, and the heels protruded so far aft that his shin seemed to be stepped into his foot at about the position of a mizzenmast.

“Good morning, boss!” he remarked with a deep, assured voice.

“Good-God-Good-Morning!” answered Gwynn in a single breath of surprise.

The Negro rose, clashed his cymbals and broke into a shuffling dance that suggested the sinister spasms of a witch doctor. The villagers drew back in horrified curiosity. Gwynn watched with an
interest that, at first, was by no means patronizing. It then occurred to him – and he admitted disappointment – that he could put on the act just as well himself. Those capers were
pure fake – evidently a successful fake, for the Negro must have received a night’s lodging and, to judge by the empty bowls on the bench, a breakfast of bread and beans.

“You do pretty well out of it,” said Gwynn.

“If,” answered the Negro, pointing to the remains of the stomach-cheating beans, “you call this well.”

He leapt, clattering, up and down as if to counteract or perhaps emphasize, for the sake of the villagers, the effect of his calm, sane utterance in the foreign tongue. The impression, Gwynn
thought, might be that of an oracle speaking with solemn lucidity between the writhings of the spirit.

“How long has the afflicted been with you?” he asked the headman.

“He came last night. He could depart,” the headman added hopefully, “with your lordship. He will make the way short with fooleries and magic since he speaks your
lordship’s tongue.”

“He speaks Persian?”

“A little. Like a child.”

“What on earth are you doing here all alone?” Gwynn asked the Negro.

“Seekin’ the light, oh ma lord!” he answered, merrily changing his cultured English to the dialect of the American colored man.

“And when you’ve found it?” Gwynn invited, showing by a smile that he had caught – if he were meant to catch – the allusion to that bazaar rumor which had sent him
too, though not on bare black feet, into this heart of aridity.

“A small share, boss, a small share. I assure you I don’t expect to be allowed to keep very much of it for myself.”

“You choose an odd way to travel.”

“Oh, my dear sir – or boss, I mean – there are only two ways for an African to preserve his liberty. He can frighten you, or he can play the fool. And if he can do both at
once, the world is open to him. It’s a lot more fun, you know, than being a crook politician on the Gold Coast.”

“Like a lift?” Gwynn asked.

It was partly interest in this sure, fantastic and obviously well-educated mountebank, and partly pity for the villagers who would never get rid of the incubus until it wanted to go.

“Where to, boss?”

The question was unanswerable. There was really nowhere to leave the man unless he were driven back to the Ispahan road; and, since that was the road from which he had fooled, begged and tramped
his way into the hills, presumably he didn’t want to return there. Nor did Gwynn, yet.

“Did you come along the river?” he asked.

“Over the mountains.”

“There’s a path?”

“Just for two feet and four.”

“Has it been used recently?”

“Mr. Fomin is two valleys east of here with seven ponies and three men.”

This answer, so detailed, so unreserved, was what he least expected. He knew that the Russians must be in or approaching the district, but that Fomin, a thoroughly competent geologist, should
have fallen for this bazaar rumor of uranium was astonishing; he must have known very well how improbable it was that radioactivity could be the cause of this luminescence – if indeed there
really was any. No doubt he had received an unarguable order from the ambassador or one of his satellite commissars. Nothing happened in Persia that they didn’t know, but, since their
credulity was so immoderate, no truth was of any value.

So there they all were – Fomin with ponies, himself with a truck, and this confounded Negro on the vast leathers of his feet, all chasing a story that had filtered down from a bunch of
shepherds, a wandering tribe which, for one spring in twenty years, had found enough young grass to leave their usual route by the east of the hill and pass below its western face. And they had
reported – what they pleased. A star imbedded in the hillside, a nameless glory, a whole hill that shone in the night.

The older the civilization, he thought, the more mysterious the country. In the unexplored you knew exactly what you would find; the next, the unknown hundred miles had every chance of being
exactly like the last, and if there were anything of humanity that was new, its precise degree of degradation would only excite an anthropologist. But in lands whose every mile had, sometime, been
known to the priest or merchant, there was no guessing what you might discover.

It wasn’t the first time he had followed a rumor. There was the story of the eternal flame and its altar – persistent among the nomad tribes of Luristan, though every educated
Persian laughed at it. The legend had seemed worth investigation, for, to a mining engineer, there was nothing impossible about an eternal flame in oil-bearing hills. Sure enough he had found it,
and sure enough it was eternal – or at any rate old enough to possess a rough altar four thousand years old. It was of no commercial value – there wasn’t a city within five
hundred miles that would pay for the piping of natural gas – yet he had come again upon a mystery that was ancient before the first Zoroastrians had worshiped it.