“You must upkeep your defencelessness, Mr. Norman! Is no Marquis of Roxbury rules here, I am frightened to say.” And he laughed again from his belly. I did my best to ignore him.
It is not to exaggerate the point to say that Archibald Lampman shone a light upon the hitherto dim corners of his friend’s mind and made him reconsider certain assumptions. As much as it pained Fessenden to admit it, Lampman may have been right about the location of the Seriadic Lands. In fact, the scientist was newly excited about the possibility of filling large gaps in the Puzzle, and all because of a shift, led by Lampman’s uncanny intuition, in focus. To be precise, a shift northward. It was something Archibald had been hinting at for years, ever since he called attention to the very simple fact that although the Nile flowed from the south to the north, the ancient Egyptians grounded their entire cosmology in an east-west orientation. The mountain peak behind which the sun rose on the longest day of the year; the corresponding peak behind which it set on the shortest day; the mountain above which the sun stood at noon mid-year—where were these markers in Egypt? Or in Greece, for that matter? Or in what was then Babylon? Not there. Or, if indicated, they paled against the description of the original myth as recorded by the ancients.
He writes that he was looking at Eusebius again and was thinking about what the ancient scholar said about the Cabiri: “These things the Cabiri, the seven sons of Sydyk, and their eighth brother Esmun first of all set down in memoirs as the god Taatus commanded them.” Fessenden discovered that “Sydyk” means “pointing up to the sky” and was the name given to an ithyphallic monument. The sons of Seth may well have built the stelae. Fessenden’s Stieler’s Hand Atlas, plate 49, page 19, locates a Caucasian village called Pssydache (Sydach) right in the centre of the eyot between the Terek and Sunsha Rivers in the upper Alizon Valley. This may well be the location of one or both of the lost columns.
Fessenden made another etymological point: “Seirios” until late meant the sun itself and not the star. “Seriadic,” then, might mean the country of the sun (Seirios). It might mean the country of the lasso users (seira). Or it might mean the country of the Seres. The kingdom of the Seres was near the mouth of the Hypanis River, now called the Kuban. Some think the kingdom extended across the entire Caucasus Isthmus from the Black to the Caspian. This, according to a fragment of Euripides’ Phaeton, was Asiatic Sarmatia, the land of Ur (Apollo), the place where he stabled his horses. And according to Liddell and Scott, a “seira” was a line with a noose used by the ancient Sagartians and Samaritans to entangle their enemies, and was still employed today in the region. The north Caucasus, being ruggedly mountainous, was probably not thought of as the land of the sun. Hence all the more reason for them to look south of the range.
Inside the station house we were able to procure a meal consisting of spiced sausage, kippers, and goat’s milk cheese, with the ubiquitous black bread and a copious supply of vodka and wine. We helped ourselves to the buffet after Sergei spoke to the proprietor, making it clear that I would be the one paying the bill, and we sat ourselves around a plain but sturdy wooden table. Through a small window I could now see a queer grouping of animals that I had missed on arriving: of all things, a camel stood passively among a flock of chickens, ducks, and geese.
The professor had already covered the table beside us with his maps and was hunched over them, his spectacles flipped onto the top of his head and his face drawn to within a hairs-breadth of the top page.
“Reginald has a remarkable facility in one of his eyes. When he brings it close to an object, the eye takes on the power of a small microscope. I don’t doubt he can see into our very souls.”
The vodka had evidently liberalised Miss Waddell’s manner as well as her tongue. She seemed more relaxed and happier but was displaying also a mask of irony that I found distasteful. What circumstances had brought these two to such a level of brusque intimacy that one could be so taunting and the other so tightly closed to her provocation? They had not known each other well before coming together on this trip, of that I was almost certain, but yet they shared a distant connection. Was it a place, a person, an event? My ability to discern disharmony between two people is a skill I have honed from long hours of observation, while sharing the compartment of a train, while lounging on the deck of a steamer, and while sipping coffee in town-centre plazas the world over.
Fessenden tolerated Miss Waddell’s presence, but only just. He was searching for something long-lost; a glance at his onionskin maps, overlaid one upon the other and forming semi-transparent strata several layers deep, told me so. The charts were ostensibly of this region: the boundaries of the Caucasus were there, the Black and the Caspian Seas, the mountains. But different areas were coloured variously and these had gentle, approximate curves rather than the precise, jagged edges of territory carved out by war. I made out the words Amazon and Aedon, and the top left corner of one of the pages was covered by what looked to be page references from such sources as Strabo and Herodotus.
“Although I can’t for the life of me think what it is he can see on his beloved maps—he’s made them all himself, you know—when he peers that closely. Fault lines? Tiny little men? Solomon’s mines deep, deep under the ground? Sergei, would you be a dear and bring me another cup of this lovely turpentine?”
“Too much wodka, dear lady, is not so gentle upon stomach. I fetch you some wine instead.” Sergei was as smitten with her as I was. Only the scientist appeared not to care if she was well or ill. He must hardly have tasted his food as he wolfed it down while moving his focus back and forth between the charts and a notebook he had drawn from his overcoat pocket. This, I realised, was the intense concentration, at the expense of all social niceties, that leads to great invention and discovery. This ability to block all distraction is something I confess I cannot do, for I thrive on the bombardment of stimuli from the outside world. I am a sponge for it, a dog in a field of daisies running hither and thither from bee to bird to burrow.
Sergei went to speak again to the keeper of the station, a bushy-bearded man with arching eyebrows and a full, taut belly, about tapping some of the dreadful Circassian wine that they store in sewn ox hides, entire skins minus the head, bloated with the bitterly fermented liquid. To draw a draught, one unties a cinched foreleg and the monstrous fluid gushes forth like blood. As long as he hid the nature of the wine’s container from her, Sergei might have done well to woo the young colonial lass. But what was she doing here? What did she carry in that box that never left her sight? I considered warning her not to guard it so conspicuously, for then it might be made the target of one of the many thieves who populate the region. Jewels perhaps. An heirloom. Or keepsake letters from her many admirers, love-struck Canadian cowboys and woodsmen.
In Ottawa the relentless arctic blast held the hellish frozen city in its grasp, and Lampman prayed for relief. It was so harsh, the air like ice spears piercing his lungs, that he had to swaddle his face in layers of scarves before venturing the few blocks to work. While he trudged up Metcalfe Street, he warmed himself with snatches of his favourite verse, and with thoughts of the myth lands and the possibility that they could be, of all places, in the Caucasus.
Of all the connections Fessenden had posited thus far—present-day Terek with Erech of the Gilgamesh epic, the Dariel Pass with Erebus, Sekhet-Eli with Sakatley—it was the Alizon Valley with Eden that had a lock on his imagination. To stand upon that ground, in the lee of the mountains, and to see the Garden as the ancients remembered it, to visit such a place once before death was his abiding wish. Perhaps the grip of winter had him thinking obsessively about balmy climes. But, no, it was not that alone. For all Fessenden’s insistence upon reproducible, “hard” evidence, as the inventor called it, and upon logic, Lampman found himself sharing his friend’s excitement for discovery, for the reality