The Weeping Ash (56 page)

“Dear Cal! I am very glad for you. What is the idea for the new poem?”

“It concerns a tree—a great tree. For some odd reason—I do not know how it comes about—perhaps because we traveled through so many of those dark, wooded, vine-grown valleys coming down to Kabul—but ever since we left the Bai's castle, night after night, I have been dreaming about a tree, a great twisted tree.”

Scylla stared at him, profoundly struck.

“Why, Cal, how strange! So have I!”

“Do you remember when we were children, we would very frequently be dreaming the same dream? You often used to remind me of what we had dreamed when we were eating breakfast, and Mama used to scold us and say it must be nonsense.”

“So I did,” Scylla said slowly. “I had forgotten that. I expect—” She stopped, then said, “Very likely all the adventures we have been through together lately have brought us back into that old childhood connection which we had when our whole world was each other. But tell me about your tree. What is it like?”

“It is an ash; Odin's tree, you know, the lightning tree.”

“Yggdrasil! I remember Uncle Winthrop telling us that its roots passed through the center of the world.”

“The Greeks, as well as the Norsemen, worshipped ash trees,” said the well-read Cal. “Hesiod quotes a myth of man being made from an ash bough. Zeus was nourished by an ash nymph, one of the Meliae, and the goddess Nemesis is sometimes represented as an ash tree.”

“Nemesis: Fate…” Scylla shivered, remembering Khalzada's words over the salt bowl: “I see a great tree, a great twisted tree—it is a sacred tree, but far away, far in the north—a tree of great anger and power—”

The coincidence was very strange. Had the tree passed from her mind into that of her brother? Should she tell him about Khalzada's prophecy? But it made her profoundly uneasy; there was something shadowy and menacing about it; and she decided to wait until some later time when she was in better spirits. Cal, in any case, had moved on to other matters and was telling her of the Emperor Babur's tomb, which he had visited, and another, quite unexpected one—

“Just fancy, Scylla, the inscription was in English and it said, ‘Here lyes the body of Joseph Hicks, the son of Thomas Hicks and Eldith, who departed this lyfe the eleventh of October 1666.' Was not that a strange thing to find in Kabul?”

“He certainly died far from home,” said Scylla, and shivered as if a goose had walked over her grave.

* * *

The caravan to Herat set off several hours before dawn, and this was to remain the pattern of travel throughout the journey. Taking advantage of the cooler hours of darkness, the long string of loaded horses and mules would make as good speed as they could between 4 a.m. and noon, then rest through the hottest hours of day, then move on again between evening and midnight. Scylla and Miss Musson, heavily veiled, still in the role of holy nuns from the Himalayas, which had served so well on the previous leg of the journey, rode on mules; Cal and Cameron and the Therbah had small shaggy but powerful horses from the northern plains. The journey was uneventful. They spent several days skirting the mountain slopes forming the central massif of Afghanistan: stony hillsides covered with shrubs, wild pistachios, rhubarb, and gooseberries. Occasionally in the distance they would see a group of wild pastoral nomads with flocks of sheep or goats, and black tents, but no marauders came to attack them. The rough stony track was marked along its way with mud towers. Here and there they must climb over a mountain pass or ford a pebbly river, but these mountains were tame and unimpressive compared with the ones they had left behind. The main problem here was lack of water; as spring advanced and the weather became hotter and hotter, the rivers shrank to mere trickles, and often a day would pass without their finding any water that was fit to drink. For this reason, Cameron told them, the route became impassable during the very hot weather. On the twelfth day they arrived in Herat.

“Why do we have to go so far north?” Scylla demanded impatiently of Cameron. “Does not Persia lie to the west of us? Why may we not strike directly westward to Isfahan?” and he replied simply, “Because there is no road, my child. The land to the west of here is one of the worst deserts in the world, the Dasht-i-Lut. No one has crossed it and survived.”

“Oh,” she said, quite quenched.

Herat (the Greek Aria, Cal informed his sister) was a thriving town that lay in a beautiful fertile valley, making a pleasant change from the bleak land they had passed through. The town was surrounded by a high mud wall with great towers at frequent intervals (built by Tamburlaine) and, as additional defense, a wide moat, fed by the Hari River. Herat, an important posting stage on the east-west route, had more than twenty serais where silk, wool, and manufactured articles were sold. The skyline was bulbous with the domes and minarets of mosques. In this busy place Cameron was able, without too much difficulty, to arrange for the party to join another caravan, a camel cafila this time, which was due to set out for Baghdad in four days.

Now
he will surely leave us and go back to help his friend Prince Mahmud, Scylla thought.

But to her amazement—and, she thought, that of Cal and Miss Musson also—he did not. It seemed there was another friend of his, an exiled adherent of Mahmud, who now lived in Baghdad, and Cameron had decided to make contact with this man and enlist his help. He was a wealthy merchant and could probably do more, if he was willing, than many devoted but humble followers in Herat. Therefore they were to have Cameron's company as far as Baghdad. Scylla found herself almost sorry that it was so. Since he was bound to part from them sooner or later, she could not help longing, in a kind of feverish impatience, for the parting to be over.

Cameron, however, set about calmly and capably equipping them for this longer desert journey. The distance from Herat to Baghdad, traversing the whole country of Persia, would be about sixteen hundred miles, or eighty days' journey on camelback. The road was not difficult, however, as for most of the way, it ran across open, level plains; it could even be undertaken by wheeled vehicles during the cooler months, but both Scylla and Miss Musson were emphatic in their preference for riding.

“It will have to be camels, you understand?” Cameron warned them. “It is too hot for horses now; only camels can survive the long dry stretches.”

“Then camels let it be,” said Miss Musson.

Accordingly Cameron bought seven (he said it was cheaper to buy than hire, and then resell in Baghdad); five riding camels and two for baggage. They were expensive, moreover, since there was a shortage: sixty rupees apiece for the riding beasts and forty for the baggage carriers.

At the last moment Cameron's Therbah suddenly announced that he was not coming with the party; he intended to go and visit his own village to the north of Herat. Briefly, with the minimum of ceremony, he mounted the camel that had been bought for him, took his leave, and departed. Everyone was sorry to see him go, for he was such a friendly, cheerful little man; nothing ever seemed to put him out. Scylla wondered how Cameron would ever manage without him; but there seemed to be a very good understanding between the two men, and it was evident that they planned to meet again when Cameron returned to Herat.

As on the previous portion of the journey, they set out before dawn. The saddles were different from those of the Bai's camels; these consisted of a framework of four upright poles, lashed together by crosspieces, supported on a kind of mattress stuffed with camel hair. The rider sat on the mattress and, when the sun was at its hottest, could stretch a blanket over his head, its corners tied to each of the poles, and so ride along shaded by a traveling tent. In the morning the caravan would set out at a trot, which was not so bad and seemed a fairly fast rate of progress; but as soon as the sun rose the file would slow down to a walk and maintain this pace throughout the day, in order not to overtire the camels. The distance they were covering as too great to allow of carrying much fodder for the beasts, which must therefore graze along the way. These halts were exasperating to Scylla. What a dawdling method of progress this seemed! And the walking gait of a camel was torture to the rider, at the end of the first two or three days she and Miss Musson were so stiff when they dismounted that they could hardly stagger a yard until they had rubbed each other's aching backs and thighs.

There were occasional trees along the route—palms, tamarisks, and a mimosa-like tree with yellow blossoms—but for the most part the land was bare desert. The route was marked along its way by conical pyramids constructed by Shah Abbas to guide travelers. At each stage they found caravanserais built of sun-dried clay bricks, generally in the form of walled courtyards with stalls or cells around them, the walls often twenty feet high, the cells entered by arched doorways. These had been erected for the use of voyagers by various wealthy and pious persons—but they differed considerably: some were ruinous, little more than crumbling shells, while others were in a fairly good state of upkeep. Sometimes there would be a well, and palm trees giving shade, in the center of the courtyard. But often, if the day's march had been slow, the whole caravan would be obliged to pass the night in the bare desert, with the camels crouched around the outside of the camp in a ring and the humans inside. The men would strike their daggers on bits of flint to kindle fires of camel's thorn. Sometimes Cameron or Cal managed to shoot a gazelle or a desert hare, from which the women could make soup; otherwise the party subsisted on pulse and dried fruit.

The caravanserais offered more privacy at night, with their little cell-like chambers, but these were often verminous, with hundreds of fleas hopping among the dried thorns and reeds left by previous travelers. On the whole Scylla preferred to sleep in the open, though it was alarming, sometimes, to lie shivering in the chill of the desert night under blazing stars and hear the cough of a leopard near at hand among the rocks or concealing sand dunes; at the sound the camels would all begin to roar and gurgle, half rising to their feet; the drivers would curse them and fire a few shots to discourage the leopard; nights in the open tended to be restless and wakeful. And all the way Scylla dreamed, almost every night, about a great tree; and, when she asked him, she learned that Cal did too.

Cal found the desert journey frustrating because, although in Herat he had equipped himself with various notebooks and a slab of Chinese ink which he could moisten as required, there was hardly any opportunity for writing. Consequently his poem remained mostly pent up inside his head and he was in a continual ferment lest he forget any particularly choice line.

“Listen, Scylla!” he would call, urging his camel alongside hers. “Which of these do you prefer:

“Nine days of fire, nine piercing nights of hoar

The pierced god hung upon the weeping tree

Whose taproots plumb the still unfathomed core

Of black Ginnunga's chasm, where the three

Dread shadows spin the skeins of destiny—

“Do you think it should be
pierced
god? Or the
impaled
god hung upon the weeping tree?”

“You have piercing nights—just before—perhaps it should be impaled, so as not to repeat the word?”

“But the repetition is intentional, Scylla, deuce take it! The question is, which word sounds better before god, pierced or impaled?”

Scylla gave it as her opinion that pierced sounded better. “I don't care for the impaled god, Cal. Pray who is he, your pierced god? Odin?”

“Of course!” he said impatiently. “Odin hung himself upon Yggdrasil for nine days to learn wisdom. Now listen to this:

“Nine days he knew that anguish; through his heart

Gungnir the sacred shaft, which only he

Might wield, held with its deadly dart

Odin transfixed above the whispering sea,

Mimir's dark waters, flowing to eternity.

“What do you think of that, Scylla?”

“Your last line has twelve syllables; all the rest have ten.”

“Of
course
it has, thickskull! It is a Spenserian stanza.”

Scylla pondered. “If it is a Spenserian stanza, should it not have nine lines? I believe you have ten.”

“Confound you, Scylla,” Cal said, laughing. “You are right!”

“What happens next?” Scylla wanted to know.

“Odin prays to the tree for wisdom, and then he creates man and woman out of two branches. Listen:

“At which the tree obeys, yields up its store

Of wisdom. Now the god, released, renewed,

Pacing with Loki on the ocean shore,

Perceives two blocks of timber, roughly hewed.

Ask, be thou man!' The log of ash, imbued

With soul and sense, breathes, weeps, and kneels in praise;

‘Embla, be woman!' Elmwood, rough and crude.

Trembles, and is transformed to woman's grace.

The twain are given Midgard as their dwelling place.

“Oh, huzza, look—there's a hare—I wonder if I can drop him with one shot before he takes fright? Why don't
you
try for him, Scylla?”

But, since quitting the Bai's castle, Scylla had quite lost interest in shooting. She watched in wonder as Cal, forgetting all about poetry for the time being, went off in happy pursuit of the hare. Sometimes she felt that, although she had been in close contact with him ever since they were born, there were parts of her brother that were a total mystery to her; witness his total unawareness of what had happened in the Pir's cave; she knew him no more than the desert creature he was chasing; both were equally changeable, quicksilver, elusive. Where
did
he get these strange flashes of illumination?

“Your brother is writing a poem about an ash tree, I understand?”

She had not observed that Cameron, on his rangy gray camel, had fallen back alongside from his place ahead.