The Isle of Blood (41 page)

This was Aden, the land of blood and bones, a great, cauterized wound in the earth where the fist of God had slammed down, thrusting skyward heaps of shattered rock to make the mountains that brooded over the ruined landscape, sullen and lifeless and emptied of all color, except the gray of Gaia’s broken bones and the rusty red of her dried blood.

Crater was the oldest and most populated settlement on the peninsula. Described by one writer as “the Devil’s Punch Bowl,” it wasn’t just called Crater; it
was
a crater, the hollowed-out center of an extinct volcano, surrounded on three sides by jagged mountains. Camp Aden, the British garrison, was located here, along with a sizeable population of Arabs, Parsi, Somalis, Jews, Malaysians, an Indonesians.

It took more than an hour to cross the old Arab quarter of town. The narrow streets were crowded with donkey carts and gharries and villagers on foot—though there was none of the hustle and bustle that one finds in New York or London. In Crater there is much activity but little motion, for the town bakes in its punch bowl in the afternoon, when the sun fills the sky directly overhead and the shadows disappear, pinned down beneath your feet. The buildings were as drab as the surrounding countryside, tired-looking, even the newer colonial ones, slumping, it seemed to my eye, like painted gourds rotting in the sun.

We bounced along the hot, dusty street until the hot, dusty street came to an abrupt dead end. We had come to the head of Wadi Tawila, the Tawila Valley, where the volcanic heaps of hardened lava and ash reared high their bald heads toward the unforgiving sky. It was the end of civilization and of our gharry ride; we would hike up to the tanks along stone steps that snaked through a mountain defile. Our
gharry-wallah
said something to Rimbaud in French; I caught the word “
l’eau
.” Rimbaud shook his head and murmured,
“Nous serons bien. Merci.”

“You see the problem,” he gasped over his shoulder as I followed him up the steps. “Look behind you. Spread out below in all her infertile glory is the town of Crater. Aden can’t get more than three inches of rainfall a year, but when it rains, it pours! The tanks were built to stop flooding, and to give the British something to do a thousand years later. Almost there.… Around this next bend…”

He stepped nimbly around an outcropping, stopped abruptly, and pointed down. We were standing on the lip of a large cone-shaped hole excavated from solid rock, fifty feet across at the top and at least as deep, shining brightly, like marble in the sun.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked. His face glistened with sweat, his shirtfront was soaked with it, and his cheeks were ablaze with either excitement or exertion.

“It’s a hole.”

“No, it’s a very big hole. And a very old hole. See how it shines like marble? That is not marble, though; it’s stucco.”

“It’s dry.”

“It’s the desert.”

“I mean, there’s no water in it.”

“This is just one of them. There are dozens all around these hills.”

“Are you going to show me all of them?”

He stared at me for a moment. In the sunlight his eyes appeared to have no color at all.

“Would you like to see my favorite spot in Aden?” he asked.

“Is it in the shade?”

“It isn’t far, about two hundred meters, and there might be some shade.”

“Shouldn’t we be getting back to the hotel? The doctor will be worried about us.”

“Why?”

“Because he expects to find us there.”

“Are you afraid of him?”

“No.”

“Does he beat you?”

“No. Never.”

“I see. He just cuts off your fingers.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You said something like that.”

“I think I’ll go back to the hotel,” I said, turning carefully around; I didn’t want to tumble into the pit.

“Wait. I promise it isn’t far, and we can rest there before hiking back down.”

“What is it?”

“A holy place.”

I narrowed my eyes at him suspiciously, and when I did, sweat dripped into my eyes and the world melted a little.

“A church?”

“Did I say that? No. I said ‘a holy place.’ Come, it is not far. I promise.”

We climbed another series of steps that ran along a low stone wall. I looked to my left and saw Crater spread out below us, the white-washed buildings undulating in the blistering heat. At the end of the wall, Rimbaud turned right, and we continued to climb up a wide dirt path that rose steeply toward the cloudless sky. The crunch of our shoes in the volcanic dust, the heaving of air in and out of our lungs—that was the only sound as we labored to the top, where the end of the path met the pale, bled-out blue of the sky. Cresting the hill, we found ourselves at the base of a small plateau five hundred feet above the extinct crater. Another series of steps led up to the top.

“How much farther?” I asked Rimbaud.

“We are almost there.”

We rested for a moment after this final ascent, in the slice of shade beneath an archway cut into a six-foot-high stone wall that curved out of sight in either direction, a barrier that encircled the holy place of sun and rock and silent sentinel stone, high above the sea.

We sat with our backs against the cool stone, and Rimbaud wrapped his lean arms around his upraised knees and stared dreamily down into the town nestled in the blasted guts of the dead volcano.

“So what do you think?” he asked. “The best view in Aden.”

“Is that why you brought me up here, to show me the view?” I returned. I was weak from the climb, overheated and terribly thirsty. Why had I agreed to come with him? I should have stayed at the hotel.

“No, but I thought you’d like it,” he said. “You are at the entrance to the Tour du Silence, the Tower of Silence, called Dakhma by the Parsi. It is a holy place, as I told you, forbidden to outsiders.”

“Then, why did you bring me here?”

“To show it to you,” he said slowly, as if spheated andng to a simpleton.

“But we are outsiders.”

He stood up. “I am outside nothing.”

There were no sentries posted, no guards to man the entrance or patrol the grounds of the Dakhma. Dakhma did not belong to the living; we were the interlopers here. Our approach to the tower was noted only by the crows and kite hawks and several large white birds that glided effortlessly in the updrafts of superheated air.

“Are those eagles?” I asked.

“They are the white buzzards of Yemen,” answered Rimbaud.

The Dakhma occupied the far end of the compound, at the highest spot on the plateau. It was a simple structure—three massive seven-foot-thick concentric stone circles, with a pit dug inside the smallest, innermost ring, and all of it open to the sky.

“This is the place where the Zoroastrians bring their dead,” Rimbaud said quietly. “You cannot burn them. That would pollute the fire. You cannot bury them. That would defile the earth. The dead are
nasu
, unclean. So you bring them here. You lay them out on the stone, the men atop the outer circle, the women on the second, the children on the last, the one closest to the center, and you leave them to rot. And when their bones have been picked clean by the birds and bleached by the sun, you bring them to the ossuary at the bottom, until they are ground by the wind to a handful of dust. It is the
Dahkmanashini
, the Zoroastrian burial of the dead.”

He offered to take me inside for a look.

“There’s no one about, and the dead won’t care.”

“I don’t think I want to see them.”

“You don’t think you want to see them? Now, that is interesting to me, the way you said it, like you are not sure of your own mind.”

“I don’t want to see them.”

A sudden breeze kissed our cheeks. The stench of death could not reach where we stood; it rose from the ledges twenty feet over our heads, swept away by the same wind that kissed our cheeks and bore the white buzzards and the kite hawks and the crows. Their shadows raced across the grassless rock.

“Why is this place your favorite?” I asked him.

“Because I am a wanderer, and after going to and fro on the earth and walking up and down on it, I came to this place at last, the part after which there is nothing. I came to the end, and that is why I love this place and why I despise it. There is nothing left when you reach the center of everything, just the pit of bones inside the innermost circle. This is the center of the earth, Monsieur Will Henry, and where can a man go once he’s reached the center?”

I was certain the doctor would be waiting for us when we arrived back at the Grand Hotel De L’Univers. Certain too that he would be furious with me for taking off with the Frenchman without a word to anyone.
I
was angry at me for doing it and could not understndexhad. There was something about Arthur Rimbaud that brought out the irresponsible spirit, the amoral animus that says yes, when the Gypsy outside the tent urges us to “come and see.”

But the monstrumologist was not waiting for us when we got back around three that afternoon. The clerk informed Rimbaud that he had not seen Warthrop either. We retired to the same table on the terrace outside the dining room (it appeared to be his favorite roosting spot), where the poet-turned-coffee-exporter ordered another absinthe and settled in to await the doctor’s return.

“You see? You worried for nothing,” he said.

“He should be back by now,” I said.

“First you worry he will come back, and then you worry he won’t.”

“Where did he go?” I asked.

“Into town to arrange your passage to Socotra. Don’t you remember? I tried to tell him it was too soon. Bardey never gets about till five or so. He is nocturnal, like a bat. You seem nervous. What’s the matter? Is he in some kind of trouble?”

“You said it wasn’t a good part of town.”

“Because there is
no
good part of town, unless it’s Camp Aden or the English quarter, and then it is, well, the
English
quarter.”

“Should we go look for him?”

“We just got back, and I’ve just gotten my drink.”

“You don’t have to come.”

“I apologize. When you said ‘should we go look for him,’ I understood you to mean ‘should
we
go look for him.’ You may do whatever you like. I am going to sit here and finish my drink, and then I am going up to my room for a nap. I am tired from our hike.”

The afternoon tide came in. A pleasant sea breeze picked up. The sun slipped behind the Shamsan Mountains, and their shadows stretched over Crater and crawled toward us. Rimbaud finished his drink.

“I am going to lie down for a while,” he told me. “What will you do?”

“I’ll stay here and wait for the doctor.”

“If he still isn’t back when I get up, we will go into town to look for him.”

He left me alone on the terrace with the breeze and the advancing shadows and the ever-present faraway jingling of the tambourines. The little Arab boy came out to fetch Rimbaud’s empty glass and asked if I wanted another ginger ale. I ordered two and drank them both quickly, one right after the other, and was still thirsty afterward, as if this lifeless land had sucked every drop of moisture from my body.

Around five o’clock the door opened behind me and I turned around, expecting—
knowing—
it was the doctor.

Two men stepped outside. One was very large with a shock of bright red hair. His companion was much shorter and thinner and ad no hair at all. Rurick took the chair on my right; Plešec sat down on my left.

“You will not run,” Rurick said.

I nodded. I would not run.

“Where is Warthrop?” he asked.

The question eased some of my terror. It meant the doctor was still alive. How long he—and I—would stay that way was the issue. For a brief moment I wondered how they had found me, and then I decided it was a pointless speculation. The
how
did not matter, and the
why
I already knew. Would it be
if
or
when
? That was the salient point.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

Something sharp pressed against my stomach. Plešec was leaning toward me, his right hand hidden beneath the tabletop. When he smiled, I noticed that one of his front teeth was missing.