The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Fifth Annual Collection
- Автор: Датлоу Эллен, Виндлинг Терри
- Год: 1992
- Язык: английский
- Год: St.Martin’s Press
- Жанр: Ужасы
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He was fascinated by the route I had taken in discovering him. The Iraqi government had made formal representation to the British government, five years before, for the return of the “Tel Enkish Stone” to its natural site. Unlike Elgin Marbles, which the British Museum regarded as their right to keep safe, no official in London had ever heard of the Tel Enkish Stone.
The argument had waged within those same “scenes” for years, and had finally been taken up by the press. A picture of one of the other Tel Enkish stones had caught my attention, along with the headline: Where Is The Alexander Stone? some keen reporter had obviously done his research to the point where he had made the connection.
The museum by that time had established that the stone had been removed by Professor Alexander, who they understood had retired to an unknown location after returning from the Middle East in the late 1890s. The Iraqi government believed none of this of course, thinking that the British Museum had the stone hidden, and relations were soured between the two countries for some years afterwards.
I have told Legmeshu that the stone lies in a quarry, the location of which I shall make known to the museum on my return to the United Kingdom. He has accepted this.
The story of those events, eighty years before, is difficult to ascertain. Alexander had worked on the site with Legmeshu’s own great-grandfather. The two men had been close friends, and had made the astonishing discovery of the megaliths at the heart of the mud-brick temple together. There had been eight stones arranged in a circle, standing vertically. Four stones had lain across their tops. A mini Stonehenge. And in the centre, four altars, three to known gods, one . . . one that defied explanation.
“No trace of those altars remain,” Legmeshu told me over tea. “But my greatgrandfather’s notes are quite clear. There were three altars to the three phases of the Hunter God: the youth, the king, the wise ancient. But to whom the fourth altar was dedicated . . . ?” He shrugged. “A goddess perhaps? Or the king reborn? My relative left only speculation.”
There had been a difference of opinion during that first excavation; a fight; and a death. Apart from what I have written here, the record is blank, save for a folk memory from the inhabitants of Scarfell concerning a tree that grew one winter— a black and evil-looking thorn.
Legmeshu snatched my copy of the Scarfell inscription. He ran his eyes over the signs, the cuneiform script that seemed as familiar to him as was my own alphabet to me. “This is not all of it,” he said after a long while. I had realised some time before that the fourth surface of the stone, flush with the brickwork between door and ceiling, had characters on it like the other three. They could not be read of course without demolishing the cottage, which I had not been prepared to do at the time. I told Legmeshu that the fourth side had been exposed over a long period to the toxic air of a northern English factory town and the characters had been all but erased.
He seemed beside himself with fury for a moment. “What a destructive and stupid thing to do, to leave the stone in such a place. It must be returned! It must be rescued!”
“Of course,” I said. “I intend to do so on my return to England. I have only just located the stone myself, after years of studying my great-uncle’s notes . . .”
He seemed mollified by this. I have no intention of giving up the whereabouts of the stone however. I lie without shame. I feel obsessively protective towards the stone . . . towards the cottage, and yes, in my adulthood, towards the tree. Somehow they are linked through my great-uncle and to remove or destroy any one of them would be like smashing the Rosetta Stone with a sledge hammer.
Legmeshu seemed to come to a sudden decision, saying, “Follow me,” and led me down to the site itself. We came at last to the wide tarpaulin that covered the centre of the temple.
It was an area of mystical energy. I could sense the presence of invisible power. It had an immediate and lasting effect on me. I began to shake. Even as I write— hours after the experience—my hand is unsteady. As I stood there I was in the far past. Fingers of time brushed through my hair; the breath of the dead blew gently against my face. Sounds, smells, touches. . . and an overwhelming, awe-inspiring presence—silently watching me.
Legmeshu seemed entirely unaware of these things.
His voice brought me back to the present. He was pointing to the small concrete markers that now showed where the stones had stood, in a circle about twenty feet in diameter. On the floor, clearly outlined in the dry mud, were the twisting impressions of roots.
“It was open to the sky,” Legmeshu said. “In the centre of the stones a tree had been grown, quite a large tree by the looks of it. The four altars were oriented east-west. We think there may have been a mud-filled pit below the trunk of the tree, to support its growth.”
“And the purpose of the place?” I asked. Legmeshu smiled at me and passed me a small book. I opened it and saw that he had written out the translations from each stone. The particle content of the Alexander stone had just been added and I studied the stilted English. Almost immediately I was aware of what I was reading.
Legmeshu’s breathless, “It includes much of the original epic that has been lost, and earlier forms of the rest. It is a momentous find!” was quite unnecessary. I was lost in words:
And behold the waters of the Flood were gone. The mud covered the land as a cloak which stifles. Gilgamesh waited on a hill and saw Utnapishtim, Boatman of the Flood, rise from the plain of mud and beckon. “Gilgamesh I shall reveal to you a secret thing, a mystery of the gods. Hark my words. There is a tree that grows from fire under the water, under the mud. It has a thorn prick, a rose blade on every twig. It will wound your hands, but if you can grasp it, then you will be holding that which can restore youth to a man. Its name is Old Man Who Would Be Young. ” “How deep is the mud?” Lord Gilgamesh asked. “Seven days and seven nights,” answered the Boatman, and Gilgamesh drew breath and swam into the blackness.
When he had cut Old Man Who Would Be Young he swam again to the surface of the mud. Utnapishtim sent a woman with golden tresses to clean and annoint the body of the kingly man. And Gilgamesh possessed her for seven days and seven nights in a fury of triumph, and not for one moment did he let go of Old Man Who Would Be Young. And when the child was born, Utnapishtim gave it at once to Old Man Who Would Be Young, so that the first berry appeared on the branches. “Now it will grow,” the Boatman said. “And I have told you of the temple you must build and the manner of annointing the flesh.”
Now Gilgamesh departed for high-walled Uruk, and when the thorns of Old Man Who Would Be Young pricked his thumbs he was increased of power. And he denied all the old men their touch of the tree, so that their youth was denied them. But when the time came, Gilgamesh alone would place Old Man Who Would Be Young in the proper way, and lie with it in an embrace of seven days and seven nights.
Here then, carved in stone, was a version of the immortality tale of The Epic of Gilgamesh that was quite unlike the story from the clay tablets. And it was an earlier version, Legmeshu was quite adamant, a cruder form, with hints of the magic ritual that the later version appears to have lost.
“The stone came from Egypt,” Legmeshu said. “This place functioned as a ritual site of enormous importance for perhaps two hundred years. The secret plant seems to have been a thorn, which would account for the pattern of roots on the mud there. I believe this place celebrated immortality. And the fourth altar may be representationaclass="underline" the risen life. So we have Youth, King, Magus, and again Youth.”