The Secret Book of Paradys (80 page)

“I feel the moment has come to collate these disparate works, to publish my own conclusions,” said Oberand suddenly. The clock ticked. Oberand said, “Don’t you agree, some reorganization of the treatise is in order?”

“But,” said Mercile, slowly, “your publishers –”

“No, I must approach others. Perhaps I’ll need to put up the money myself. I realize perfectly the low esteem in which I’m held, as if by tongs.”

“But,” said Mercile, “further efforts with this work – What else can be said of it?”

“Very much,” said Oberand. “I can speak volumes.”

“You should not,” said Mercile.

“Oh, my friend, don’t worry on my behalf. What else can they do to me or say of me?”

Mercile felt the knife rise in him, its handle toward his hand. He had never understood it was a knife that had been forged by the years of patience and listening, the
boredom
. He tried to evade. He said, “But why expose yourself to more of the vicious attacks that –”

“Why?” Oberand cried, his eyes giving off a flash from the flames of the hearth and the spirit. “Because the truth must be spoken at whatever cost.”

“You must face it,” said Mercile abruptly, “this truth is doubtful. For God’s sake, give it up.”

And now the clock ticked more loudly, and the fire cracked like gunshot. Little sounds in the street, a whisper of wind, a distant song, came up and filled the room, thickening its air until it was nearly unbreathable.

“But I thought,” said Oberand, “that you, of all of them –” He stopped, and Mercile hung his head. Inside him was an awesome sadness, as if Oberand had just told him he, Oberand, was near death.

“Pardon me,” said Mercile humbly, at last. “I’ve tried very hard.”

“No, I don’t pardon you,” said Oberand. “You should not have tried. Or
you should have tried much harder. Did you only wait all these years to make a fool out of me tonight?”

“Oberand, my faith in you is unimpaired. Only I believe that your trust in this thing – is preposterous, ill-founded. I should have said so long before.”

“You must leave my house,” said Oberand. “You must go at once. There’s nothing to say.”

Mercile was shocked, yet not surprised. The knife had glittered in his hand, he had used it. What did he expect now? With an exhausted relief strongly enhanced by automatic regret, he rose, shaking his head in an effort at normalcy.

“Then I shall leave, at once. I’m very sorry.”

Oberand said nothing. His face was blank, wiped of everything. He had been stabbed in the back, of course, what else?

Mercile went down, donned his greatcoat, stepped into the street. Below, he glanced at the house, wondering if he would enter it again, aware he would not, then turned into the night of lamps and leaves. He felt a satisfaction. It was terrible. He nearly laughed as he walked homeward; certainly he could not keep back a smile.

2

The great mountain range filled the sky, and was the sky. Pitted and scarred, fissured and cracked, it was not white but dark. It had earned Eshlo’s name for it not through its tints, but because it seemed to belong to the surface of a dead satellite circling the earth. Anything might lie inside the wall of it. It was impenetrable.

The man who sat in the camp half a mile from the mountains’ foot was tall, thinned, and sunburnt by the lion orb of summer. He was thirty-eight. So much he knew, feeling these things sit on him, the frame within which his soul balanced. He looked from his own clear eyes, scanning the dusty plain and the first clawed slopes that pushed out of it. In the etheric sky a pair of vultures dawdled. They had been there about an hour, interested by something on the middle heights, something not yet dead enough to warrant their descent. He had noticed, no bird ever flew toward the summit of the mountains. Nothing came up over them, except rounded drifts of cloud toward sunset, like steam.

He had been here, at the foot, a month, thirty-one days. Before that was the journey, a period not of time but of time’s dissolution, an unraveling of dates and seasons, flowing sidelong, nearly backward. There had been sea, a crust of land, a wide river with a belching steamer, at length the long sinuous tributary of the Charda, with its curtains of banks dropped to the water, the masks of its reflected islands. Lions passed, or lay in the sky. A herd of zebra
galloped, an alligator raised its artifact of head – such images pinned themselves upon his brain. The man thought he should and must remember such things distinctly. But then he saw that visually they did not matter, that he might let them go from him if they wished; thus they stayed.

At first he had been fearful. So much so that seasickness and mal de terre had almost disabled him. Then, as he began to accept that he was quite adrift, lost and companionless, without hope of assistance, he relaxed, grew stronger, left behind the stomach cramps and blinding migraines, and emerged from his five decades into the newer younger body, which had wasted no years, which had sprung here immediately after Eshlo’s song and Klein’s echo. Somewhere on the river of the Charda, while the two black men rowed and the black white stared about, his rifle ready, Oberand caught up his younger self, who all that while had been there ahead of him, waiting.

They moved through the land as Eshlo had, as if nothing had altered, save in the villages they could now barter for cigarettes. It was all quite familiar to him, the people colored like coal and the beasts of the plain, and the towering sky and the river, and the mountains finally rising into view. Eshlo had been here, and told him. More, he had himself been here, often.

They made the camp under the Mountains of the White Moon. None of them had before approached the place, apart from Oberand. The man who cooked was superstitious; he had heard something of the region. He made a shrine by his improvised cook house and sank into it a collection of bones and teeth, for the god, the giant. Oberand had tried to question this man. The man then became heated, hysterical. Sweat flew off him and he gesticulated, refusing to look at the mountains or to say anything that was of use. Froth sprayed out of his mouth and André, the black white, touched Oberand’s arm, glancing at him from his odd eyes, one black and one pale gray. “He knows nothing. Best to leave him, monsieur.” Oberand obeyed, and André ordered the cook back to his rice with sharp staccato words.

Oberand explored the base of the mountains with André. They climbed a little, André the guide and adviser. He would never fully meet the eyes of the white man, he had been taught not to.

They found caves, and chasms where smoldering chains of water fell, they found the carcasses of things, one with hyenas feasting on it, the nests of birds abandoned, a defile with old painting on a wall, but these symbols gave no revelation. Every cave had a back. Each access ended against the gut wall of the rock. From boulders they looked down at the tiny camp, and saw the blacks lazing or quarreling over a game, and the river far away like a varnished seam in the ground.

“There is no way through,” said André.

“Yes,” said Oberand, “of course. There is.”

André was the first man Oberand had had any prolonged conversation with since Mercile. For this reason Oberand did not trust André. André was not like Mercile. He was young, and could have been a prince if his blood had not been mixed. His white drunkard of a father had taught him books, mathematics, and two languages. André had grown up aware he had been ruined for everything, accepting, wise, and mostly silent. Of the Valley of God he had heard, distantly, now and then. It was one of the dim wandering wisps of myth that go about any continent. It was a white man’s myth of the darkness, and as such he gave it a defined and cordoned pen. The white portion of André’s mind suggested to him that only white men would evolve a legend of black men worshiping a white god. But the giantism was not alien. There were stone cities of the jungles, and the size of these cities did not belong with the six-foot men of present days but, like certain temples of Egypt, suggested bigger beings nearer to the sun.

Eshlo’s maps, and Klein’s maps, brought into the realm of the actual, were a travesty. Though the mountains had been recognizable, they were also altered by reality. Small vital geological clues, essential in locating Eshlo’s Hidden Door, were changed or unrevealed, or else had only existed in the imagination of the writer.

It was the splitting off from Mercile, the betrayal by Mercile, which had brought Oberand to the Mountains of the White Moon, more than Eshlo or Klein, more than fourteen years of waste, and fermenting humiliation.

Oberand did not miss Mercile. At first there had been no time, for within a week of their dinner, Oberand had been making arrangements to travel out from Paradys into the wide world. Presently, looking back, there was only a slight disgust that such a man as Mercile had been permitted to deceive him. At last, and very soon, Mercile was a shadow. Beneath the Mountains of the White Moon, however, it was Eshlo that Oberand began to miss, and Klein, although Klein less painfully and clearly.

The sun was setting on the rim of the plain, and the mountains flared up, then turned suddenly to ash, lit only at their tips. There came a curious half-heard whirring note, perhaps the sunset wind passing through some hole or crevice higher up, sound carrying in the glassy air. Transparently the night came to Africa, without subterfuge, bearing the bone moon from which the mountains had been transposed. If the sun was a lion, the moon was a white-faced buck. It peered, vulnerable and savage, above the plain, lighting it as bright as day. The mountains glowed. The fire of the cook house became the center of the earth, marking, like a cross on Eshlo’s map, their place in things.

“I am here,” Oberand said aloud. “
Here
.” But that was not enough. Yet the excitement stirred in him, properly, the first occasion. It had taken so long,
for he had been so long coming to it, he had kept it waiting, like his younger self.

André stood smoking, looking at the mountains, thin and still in his European clothes. The blacks squatted at the fire, where the pot hung, full of God knew what jumble.

Speak to André
, Oberand thought. Why was that important? André knew nothing, less than the cook, who feared.

Oberand watched the camp from his tent, the pale dust and the moonlight, patches of sand between the mountains’ claws, shining. The strange sound had died out from the mountains, and the reflection from their tops. Miles off a lion roared. The stars were liquid, like mercury, in the bulb of sky.

Here I am
.

“My father taught me that men have no souls,” said André, “that this life is all we can expect, and that it will probably be unpleasant.”

The moon had set; it was darker, and somewhere hyenas were busy. The night was not the same, and André had begun to talk at the fire. He had started by saying he thought the two blacks might run away tonight. He said they were not so much afraid as anxious, a kind of anxiety attack that, because they did not see it as nervous in origin, they attributed to bad spirits of the plain and mountains. Oberand said that if this happened, it must be accepted, but would the two men steal very much? Only enough, said André, to support them on their journey back down river. Let them go, then, said Oberand, they would manage, but what of André? André had said he would remain. He was not afraid, since he did not believe that anything lay over the mountains, even if a way to it were to be found. A dry crater perhaps, an extinct volcano, poisonous and dead. Oberand was not offended by André’s pragmatism. His truthfulness, coming in a straight line after Mercile’s years of deception, was nearly appealing. Because he had wanted to, Oberand indulged himself, beginning to attempt the drawing out of André, whom he had judged as clever, and almost in his way as educated as anyone met with in the vanished metropolis. André had alarming potential that, since he was black, could never be realized – André was not strong enough, evidently, to evolve solely for himself, as so many were not.

In the background the hyenas had commenced, and then the two blacks initiated a vague annoying chanting from a stand of trees a hundred feet off. André opened a little like a crumpled paper. He spoke of the ancient cities of giants, the legends of white gods. He explained he could not believe in anything like that, although its metaphysic intrigued him.

“But why, André, is it necessary for men to have souls, in order that there be gods? Can’t this be something of a different order?”

“Man tries,” said André, “to find something greater than himself,
promising himself he will one day become such a thing. Is that not the basis of the religion of Christ?”

“I think that the religion of Christ offers a chance that we are already such a thing, and have only lost the way.”

“Without a soul,” said André, “where is the need for a god?”

“But this is a god with a valley like the Garden of Eden, the Garden before the Fall. This is a god so large that he could cover the bodies of thirty men with his palm, and crush them. What are men to such a god?”

André did not reply. He smoked his cigarette. Then he said, “What would you give to find this secret valley?”

“Everything,” said Oberand. He said, “Already, I’ve given most of it. From the first, the idea possessed me. I sacrificed all I had, and followed it.”

“Be wary, perhaps something listens.”

“But,” said Oberand, “what could that be, if there are no gods?”

“I don’t know, monsieur. But I sense it. The way a man whose hand has been cut off will feel the hand at the end of his arm, itching him. Like that. It isn’t real, but it affects him. What listens may not be real either, yet it may hear.”

Oberand felt a sudden emotional liking for André. Why in God’s name had this man not been given him to argue with, to wrestle with, this black angel in the night, over the body of Eshlo, on the ladder of light? But it was too late now.

“Let it hear me,” said Oberand, “please God.”

After a while longer, André put his cigarette into the fire.

“If we go to sleep, monsieur, the men will have their chance to run away. I will take the sugar and hide it, or they may have that too, for barter.”