Miss Waddell took advantage of a pause in his argument and addressed her rebuttal not to Fessenden but to me, as she might to the Speaker of the House during Question Period. “Water into wine, blind beggars given their sight, the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, the dead brought back to life—tell me these are not stories, expressions of desperate hope, even downright lies stretched into miracles by the overwrought imagination. The hysterical need to believe can be a powerful creative force, as the psychoanalysts have shown.” How completely did she take us in with her false counterpoint!
“No, this are miracles, simple and plainly,” said Sergei, who had roused, and who may have been playing possum all along. “Please, otherwise, where is Church? Where is faith, et cetera and et cetera?” Her puppet, her ventriloquist’s dummy.
“The New Testament is practically modern history,” Fessenden said, ignoring him. “By the time John dipped Jesus in the River Jordan, the imagination in human discourse was blossoming. Some of the best novels were being written by the later Greeks. What I’m trying to make you see—”
“Either we believe in Bible or we are not with God. Nothing else is possible,” insisted Sergei, a quick-tongued, proud, but simplistic Georgian who was maddeningly pigheaded. I saw the divergence of their three points of view, their inability to find common ground on which to stage the discussion, to be my cue to bring it back to my original position.
“You are in the Caucasus for theological reasons then, Professor?”
“A scientific enquiry into the origins of certain recorded events. Biblical, yes, but similarly to be found in the traditions of many ancient cultures, all of which valued truth-telling above all else!”
“Point made and taken,” said Katherine, about whom I was thinking in a more familiar way now ever since I had urged her to use my given name. “We’ll have to start calling you Reg the Sledge!” He winced, whether under the heat of her criticism or because of the familiarity of her address—the same intimacy I now hoped for—I could not be certain.
“Archaeological in nature?” I asked.
“Yes,” Fessenden said, “although I haven’t the time or the money this trip to do any sort of intensive digging. Should I find what I believe is buried at various spots in this region, it would surely be the result of happy chance. No, it is simply that for years in my spare time, usually late at night after I have finished working in the lab for the day, I have been reading ancient texts and poring over a variety of maps. I reached a point at which either I would see this land with my own eyes or close the books and roll up the maps forever.”
Archibald Lampman suffered from a weakened heart and lungs, the result of a childhood illness. Fessenden remained solicitous of his friend’s delicate constitution throughout their correspondence. He was glad to read in a letter that Lampman had recovered his strength, and that his government job was not so odious as to distract him entirely from his writing. A foray Lampman and his literary friends proposed to take into the wilds of Algonquin Park, Fessenden wrote, filled him with no small amount of envy. At that point in his career he was one of Thomas Edison’s leading chemists and would have welcomed the chance to extricate himself from the laboratory for a few days to accompany his friend on such an invigorating outing, but the work there would not wait.
They were still debating the location of the Pillars of Hercules. He thanked Lampman for his thoughts regarding Thoth, who by the poet’s reckoning was the first Hermes. They were still left with the problem of geography, that is that their sources, Manetho the Sebennyte in particular, were writing in and about Egypt. By his own account, Fessenden writes, Manetho copied inscriptions engraved on columns erected by Thoth in the Seriadic Lands, which were generally agreed to be somewhere in Egypt. After the Flood, these inscriptions were transcribed from hieroglyphic characters into Greek, written down in books, and deposited by Agathodaemon, son of the second Hermes and father of Taut, in hidden chambers of the Egyptian temples. The chambers are described in Ammianus Marcellinus as “certain underground galleries and passages full of windings .”This writer says that they engraved on the walls of these chambers “numerous kinds of birds and animals and countless varieties of creatures of another world.” Fessenden found that last bit—creatures of another world-—intriguing. Most likely, he pointed out, Marcellinus was referring to beasts of the African jungle.
He agreed with Lampman that Taautus of Egyptian and Phoenician mythology was probably the same as Taaus of the Babylonians, and that Taut and Thoth were possible derivatives of the same name. He was probably Theos of the Thracians. The name means “The One Who Does Things for the Spirits.” I think of a private secretary or executive to the gods. Was he Hermes the messenger? Perhaps, thought the inventor, who wrote that he would need more evidence than they had at hand to accept that the land of the Seriad and the Pillars of Hercules were anywhere but in Egypt.
The carriage slowed almost to a halt, and the professor was interrupted by a sudden explosion of sound: deep, savage barks from an apparent pack of wild dogs, veritable wolves, that flung themselves at the auxiliary horses. Their muzzles were drawn back to expose lethal, snapping teeth, and their ears lay flat with alarm against their heads. Still more of them lay panting by the side of the road, and ahead of us blocking the way—I turned and peered around the driver’s back—was a stream of sheep and goats being herded toward us in no great hurry. They stopped when they saw the carriage and parted only when they had to, when it was clear they should give way or be trampled by the shoes of our horses. The shepherds, two older men and a boy, raised their hands in greeting as we approached them but could do little to help speed our way. Their faces were sunburned the colour of darkly oiled wood, and they wore long, earth-tone mantles that covered them neck to toe, and on their heads, pie-shaped felt caps. In his hand each carried a long staff that looked to be twice his height.
“Why don’t they move out of the way?” Katherine asked.
“Is no hurry,” Sergei said. “Besides, is no place to go.”
Indeed, close by on our left was the river, and on our right the start of a wall of rock that towered above us. The increasing roar of the Terek in its confinement was punctured at times by the shepherds calling to their flock with a piercing, high-pitched cry.
“Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin travelled this way,” Sergei said, “along very same road. Of course, road has been improved since then. ’We hear muffled roar and catch sight of Terek spewing forth in directions severally. Too noisy almost, the waves turning wheels of low Ossetian mills which looking like are houses for dog.’ There,” he said, pointing, and we saw one of the very same structures in the water. From a distance it resembled a child’s miniature. “Pushkin saw Turkish prisoners— this is 1820, 1830—working on road. Being writer, greatest poet like Goethe and Shakespeare, he cannot pass by without talking to them. Like you, Mr. Norman—I am shocked you do not make interview with these shepherds for writing your book. You are quiet writer, like all English, quiet and proper. Turkish prisoners complain to him about food is given to them. All day is Russian black bread. They cannot getting used. This is making Pushkin think of friend—I cannot remember name—just returned from Paris. He is so sad. ’There is nothing to eat there,’ he says. ’Nowhere could I get black bread!’”
He guffawed at his joke and slapped our knees. Finally we saw the last set of double-curled ram horns and fat, twin bustles on the hind ends of the sheep, and heard the final raucous bleat of the evil-looking, vile-smelling goats, and got our speed up once more. After a dozen versts, we arrived at a stone building that looked more like a garrison than a way station. The air felt even colder without the stream of animals to wade through, and the thought of bread made me feel suddenly famished.
Fessenden drew a long cylindrical leather case from under his seat and removed the cap from one end. From it he took a rolled map, which he began to unfurl, but because the wind was gusting crazily here and because he needed a flat surface upon which to spread it, he made