The Temple

    
 I saw it off in the distance, shimmering like ice crystals in a lightning storm. When the Narsazi had told me it was carved out of solid salt but I had just smiled. People are so gullible and the Narsazi believe anything, the more wondrous the better. They are a nation of hookah smokers and storytellers.
 Not so with John Henry Steele; I am an archeologist, formed by my rigorous discipline, and thus disinclined to credulity. I left fairy tales behind when I left my nursery.
 So, why did my pulse race when I finally beheld the Temple of Darsh glowing in the distance? Was I still dazed by the bowl I had shared with the High Priest who shared its history with me?
 He was a cunning little monkey, the High Priest. Bald, toothless, brown as a nut and quick as mercury to frown or smile. He took my offering and handed me a little white bowl filled with a brownish liquid. I took a quick taste, blanched and handed it back to him. He peered at me through llama's eyelashes and grinned.
 "It is miracle juice," he said. At least that is what I think he said; my Narsazi is only rudimentary. "Now you will see clearly, white man."
 Indeed, I thought.
 "I can look into your soul, white man. In you, I see a thorn bush of little men who  fight each other. Some are angry, some are weeping and some laugh. Do not be afraid. I see that one day there will be no longer a battle in your heart. On that day, you will be a free man like me."
 I looked at the naked little priest and tried to look attentive and respectful even though he was speaking utter rot.  My career as a scholar has taught me the wisdom of bridling my tongue and looking as though I agreed with my colleagues no matter how harebrained their theories.
 The priest laughed. "Ah, now you think that I am nothing but a mad old man. No, do not speak. I can see it in your heart. But I tell you, white man, I speak the truth. You will see the temple of Darsh and you will be given a vision. Through the vision, you will dig up the thorn bush that grows in your heart." Then he muttered to himself too quietly for me to make out the words. I gathered that I was dismissed. I bowed deeply and left to find Smedley Johnson, my doctoral student.
 Smedley was in the camp, directing the porters and organizing our equipment.
 "I say, Doctor S. You look a bit pensive, what?" said Smedley. I detected a note of concern.
 "Not at all, Johnson," I said, my voice suitably chilled to end this line of enquiry. There is no welcome mat in front of my psyche, thank you very much.
 "Now then, Johnson. Is everything in order? Are we ready to make the trek?"
 "Oh, yes sir, Doctor! The men are waiting for your instructions."
 "Right ho! Let's talk to their mucky-muck."
 Their chief was a tall man with a long white scar across his right cheek as though he had lost a duel in Heidelberg. I lifted my right hand to acknowledge his status and explained what I wanted. His face was impassive until I mentioned the Swamp.
 "You want to cross the place of miseries?" he said, clearly shocked.
 "It is, by far, the most direct route," I said firmly. "Will there be a problem?"
 "The men will not cross it," said the chief. "The ground is cursed!"
 "It is the only way," I said. "The Rushi will not let us cross their land and mountains block us from the west."
 He spat out an unpleasantry when I mentioned his enemy, the tribe to the east.
 "You must take us through the swamp; we will pay you double," I said.
 "They will refuse," predicted the chief, but I sensed that his resolve was softening.
 "We will leave in ten minutes," I said. "Come Johnson, let us see to our tools." And we left the chief muttering his protests. My theory is that eventually men will do as they are told if you act as though they had already agreed. Perhaps it is arrogance, but it works more often than not with these primitive peoples.
 From his silence and his wrinkled brow, I could tell that Johnson was ill at ease so I allowed him to broach the subject.
 "I say, Doctor, is it wise to transgress against the Narzasi's ...er religious views?" he said.
 "Science must not be slowed down by the immature and ludicrous superstitions of primitives," I said shortly.
 "No, I suppose not," he said, but I could sense that he was dragging his feet. Johnson is of good stock but his great uncle was Archbishop of York and he is loathe to trample on religion in general. Not that he is a believer himself. If he had been, I certainly would not have taken him under my wing; I will have no truck with religious blatherers.
 "Right! Let's be underway," I said, hefting my instruments onto my shoulder.
 ---
 The Swamp was before us: malodorous, muddy and rank with decay. I could see mangroves and sword grass and between the dying cypress trees, little blue and red butterflies fluttering in the beams of light that filtered through the canopy. The Narsazi porters stopped abruptly and dropped their packs on the ground.
 Despite my protestations, they would not look me in the eye. They started to sing a sonorous song together which they believed would protect them from evil. I controlled my anger with difficulty and stooped down to speak to the chief.
 He was singing and nothing I  said could induce him to stop.
 "Perhaps, we can make a cache here and go on without them," said Johnson. "We can pay them to guard what we can't carry."
 I hated being bested by half-naked savages but I had to admit that Johnson's plan was better than my frustrated fantasy of taking out a whip and compelling them into the swamp.
 We gathered the most necessary things together in two large packs and made our way onto the spongy, tobacco brown ground. The chief and his men watched us with a mixture of anger and fear. I could see them making little hand gestures to fend off the evil that we would surely stir up.
 "Fools!" I hissed under my breath. Johnson said nothing, just hitched his pack higher on his back and trudged ahead of me.
----
 As unpleasant as the swamp certainly was, there was no denying that it was full of the most amazing animals: butterflies of vivid and unlikely color, birds that sang and chirped descants and trebles, frogs that croaked in basso profundo and contralto. If only the smell mirrored the sounds! All around, it was miasmic like a million corpses freshly exhumed. The mosquitoes were maddening; great malarial hordes of them, whining and complaining around our ears like a demented welcoming committee.
 "Bloody awful, what?" said Johnson, swiping at his ears.
 "Welcome to higher learning," I said. "They never build great architecture in easily accessible places." To which, he sighed and plodded on.
 I noticed that the pooled water was especially murky in the center of the swamp. It was roughly the color of manure and equally pleasant-smelling. I tried to keep clear of it as well as I could but at one point, I had no choice but to plunge in and hope that the mud would not spill over my boot tops. Absolutely ghastly. And already it was getting dark.
 We had clambered onto a higher spot covered over with reeds and grass and tried to build a fire. The wood was dead enough but so damp that it only smoked disagreeably. We took brandy for its fire and tried to sleep.  Surrounded by nocturnal noises and thousands of pinprick eyes in the night, sleep was elusive. I could hear Johnson praying under his breath.
 The sunrise brought with it its usual cohort of flying irritatants. I smoked my pipe in self defence, and smiled to see all of the midges and mosquitoes flock over to the clean-lunged Johnson. Ah, the perils of abstention.
 We fought through a particularly dense grove of mangroves and flopped exhausted on the muddy ground. Johnson's face was a muddy bloody mass, red as a tomato and covered with a fine sheen of sweat. I offered him my canteen and filled up my pipe again.
 "What do you make of the stories about the Temple, Doctor S.?" asked Johnson, wiping more mud onto his face.
 "Which stories?" I asked, for I had heard many.
 "I heard that it was a place where the white god-man had appeared to their fathers' fathers' fathers," he said repeating the Narsazi formula for 'once upon a time.'
 "It's a variant of the Quetzalcoatl myth," I said glibly. "But it's not to be taken seriously by real academics." Like you and I, I implied.
 "No, of course not," he said hastily. "I just find it interesting that the myth is so widespread in the Americas."
 "A good story is told again and again," I said. "Merchants bring not only goods by myths as they travel."
 "I suppose you're right," he said but his voice lacked that snap of assurance that I like to hear from my protégés.
 "What do you make of the encircled cross, that they display in their art?" he asked.
 "Interesting," I nodded. "But probably coincidental. Remember that depictions of the swastika were found both in the Indus Valley and in China: you wouldn't say that it makes them Nazis, would you?"
 "How old do you reckon that the temple is?" he asked after a while.
 "Certainly, the Narsazi and the Rushi have been living in close proximity to the flatlands for millennia, so we can hope for quite an old building, but I'll know more when I've had a chance to see the grounds and the interior," I said.
---
 We trudged through the muck for several hours before we broke for a well-earned lunch.
 "It's just odd..." said Johnson, sipping from his canteen.
 "What?"
 "I reckon that the myth of the white god-man and the cross symbols could be coincidental but how do you explain the lack of an altar?"
 "Go on..."
 "I mean, have you ever heard of an ancient people who build a temple without providing for sacrifices? It goes against all I've learned so far."
 "Johnson! Listen to yourself! You begin to sound suspiciously like a Salvation Army tub-thumper..." My words were light in tone but I was having difficulty in holding my scorn in check.
 "Well then, Doctor Steele, please explain to me how a pagan temple can have such un-pagan accouterments." His tone was phlegmatic. I paused to damp down my fire, counting to ten. When I spoke again, my voice was level and calm.
 "Well, as to that, Johnson, who can say? Perhaps, sacrifices were held at another location? We will know more when we have had a chance to poke around."
 I sounded calm but inside I was still churning. How dare he question me in that tone of voice? That arrogant pup, that evangelical mealy-mouthed hypocrite! How had one of the God-fearers gotten into my care? I had made it clear to the Dean that I was not interested in Christian scholars, an oxymoron if ever there was one. We plodded on.
-----
 "What is it, Doctor?" asked Johnson pointing at tracks under a cypress tree.
 "Jaguar, I suspect," I said. "Better have your revolver close at hand."
 If I wasn't agitated before, finding the tracks hardly encouraged me. I hate jaguars. They prowl like mist, hiding in the trees, skulking in the reeds, as silent as death. I have seen a jaguar kill his prey by crushing its skull in his jaws, driving its canines into the brain pan. Grisly.
 "Listen Johnson, jaguars are fond of ambushing their prey. Watch out for those trees on your right. They like to attack out of a blind spot."
 My words were seconds late, for as they were leaving my mouth a mottled streak shot out of the trees and seized Johnson by the neck for a killing bite. I managed several shots, all wildly inaccurate but at least I succeeded in driving of the huge cat. It shot back into the trees and howled with fury. I shivered.
 I knelt down to see to my colleague. Poor Johnson. The jaguar had completely severed his neck and the blood was gushing out. He opened his eyes and attempted a smile. He mumbled something about the devil you can't see, his words thick with pain. Then his eyes closed. He was gone.
 What was I to do with his body? I had no proper shovel for burying him and I could not burn him. I didn't like to leave him sitting in the mud but then what difference did it make to him? He was off floating into Eternity, perhaps to meet the Maker that he believed in.
 I took what I most needed from his pack and trudged out of the swamp's black heart. Finally, I came into a clearing where the ground became more stable and there in the distance I could see the temple.
 It glowed like a beacon of hope in the early evening light, nestled into the foothills of the great mountains. My heart skipped in a way that was most uncharacteristic of me. What did emotions have to do with science?
 I gathered some mercifully dry wood and made myself a proper fire.  I could hear the jaguar in the distance, roaring like a portent of doom. I shivered in my blanket.
---------
 The temple was exactly as it had been described in Fra Tomasso's work. The Jesuit had been given leave to enter it by his Rushi adherents but his report was hidden away in the Heretical Archives. "A temple unlike any other", Tomasso had written and I could see that he was right. I had to admit that Johnson's questions were burning at me. Why would a primitive people build a structure like the Temple of Darsh and why had it been left wholly abandoned? I could see why I had been told it was made of salt. The stone had a crystalline structure which certainly looked like salt. I tasted it to be sure.
 There appeared to be no central place for sacrifices and no quarters for a priestly hierarchy. It was as open as any Gothic cathedral with windows open to the light of the sun and stars. It almost reminded me of an observatory. The art was all highly abstract and confusing. The cross was an obsession with the temple builders. Fra Tomasso had written that it was "as Christian as St. Peter's would have been  Brother Francis controlled the spending." No wonder his work was consigned to the works of heresy. I had been lucky enough to have snatched a few hours with his manuscript on condition that I would not publish what I'd read.
 Night was quickly coming so I made my bed in front of the large stone centerpiece. It was a dais, sculpted with a huge cross in the middle, almost like it were a treasure map. X marks the spot, I thought to myself as I stretched out.
 That night, I dreamed of a star. It was flowing across the sky like a leaf pulled by a fast flowing river. As it drew ever near me, I gasped for it was becoming impossibly large. I felt overshadowed by the piercing brightness of the star.
 But it was no star. Rather, it was a silver structure, a cathedral of pipes, drums, axles and graceful metal ropes and pulleys. It was an engine but one of such startling size and complexity that I was sure that it could not be man-made. It was a tower, a globe and a pyramid all in one. I gaped to see it.
 I saw rainbow coloured filaments, all fluttering out toward me like the stingers of a jellyfish. I was utterly paralyzed. The filaments attached themselves to my face and neck. I could feel a coldness spreading throughout my body as though I was being lowered slowly into ice water.
 My body buzzed with impulses so that I lurched to and fro as though moved by invisible hands. And then it was over. I felt like a butterfly pinned to a corkboard, analyzed and catalogued.
 And then, a flood of memories breaching my tightly guarded consciousness: my first day at school, meeting the bully Dawkins, smoking behind the chapel, reading "The Golden Bough" in the library and deciding to leave my boyhood faith behind. I saw my romantic affairs, all utter failures. I saw my mother's deathbed and how the windows were all blacked out with dark crepe. I saw myself in the chapel choir, sing hymns that I could no longer believe.
 I was swept into a birds-eye view of the mountains surrounding the Temple of Darsh, as though I was flying from the heights to the place where the temple foundation was being laid.
 The builders were not men. Not men as I recognized men. Rather, they were elegant beings, symmetrical as humans are but gifted with many arms and no legs. How they moved was a mystery to me, it was as if they hovered over the ground.
 They were erecting great white columns of some shimmering stone in a circular pattern. The stones moved into place by the power of a great engine, like the one I first saw in my dream. Was it that I was dreaming that the engine was virtually silent? Such a construction with our tools would have been a loud and smoky affair.
 Once the columns were in place, the engine dropped a sheet fluttering to them, which hardened like a spiders' web over them. And then, a radiance suffused the freshly laid material and it glowed. Next, one of the beings placed himself at the center of the temple and stretched out his four arms to each of the cardinal directions. From the end of his arms came a glittering golden powder so that the temple was filled with a golden light.
 I was dazed and fell to my knees. At once, a being came to me and lifted me to my feet. He said no words, but somehow I could tell that I was being rebuked, that it was somehow inappropriate for me to kneel.
 In the place where the being had been, I was amazed to see that a circular depression had appeared. I moved over to examine it and I saw it slowly fill with an opaque liquid which glittered like quicksilver in the great golden hall. The being came to me and touched my forehead with one of his arms in such a gentle way that I could only feel like a young child or a lapdog. As he touched me, I could feel every negative memory that I'd ever had flood back into my mind. The bullies, the cruel masters, the distant father, the lusty choirmaster, the girls who spoke of love but practiced infidelity, the battlefield cries and the muddy terror of Flanders. I cowered under my load of pain and grief.
 The being touched me again even more gently and I knew that it was offering me the pool. Greatly alarmed, I stepped away. What would the quicksilver waters do to me?
 I sensed that the being was perplexed. Why would I resist such a benison? Did I not know that there was a realigning waiting for me in the pool? I shrugged my shoulders; I did not know what such a thing could be. I sensed a flood of warmth coming from the being and it was as if I could see a picture. It was a thorn bush, covered over with little men: some happy, some sad and some angry. The angry ones attacked the others until they were all angry. Now, the thorn bush was growing until it completely filled me, its thorns piercing me through.
 I looked at the being. He looked at me. Why would I choose to be full of angry men and thorns?
 I wanted to be free and thorn-free but I was afraid. It touched me again and I was transported into my mother's arms when I was very young, the days before governesses and schoolmasters. Everything within me relaxed and I found myself taking a tentative step toward the pool and then another one.
 I dipped my foot. It tingled in the silvery waters. I stepped in and sank to my shoulders in the warmth and safety of the healing pool. I remembered a Bible story from my youth, about angels stirring the waters of the pool so that cripples could be healed. I lowered my head and opened my eyes under the yielding liquid. I could see my body as though there were candles light within it. My bones glowed, my organs suffused with a tender light.
 I saw the little men swimming away from waters that washed over the thorn bush and a moment later there was no longer a thorn bush. Instead a tall plant, unknown to earthly botany, grew. Its leaves were intensely green and a white bud appeared. It opened into a waxy trumpet flower which released a fragrance of citrus and other spices that reminded me of Christmas baking.
 I rose out of the waters like a child newborn.
 The being came up to me and showed me a small silver disc emblazoned with the very flower that I saw opening within me. He put it in my hand and closed my fingers over it. It glowed within my fist making it red and vibrant. It had no teeth to signify smiling but it made a humming sound that made me smile in return. I put it in my breast pocket so it warmed my heart with its heat.
 And then I fell fast asleep.
-----
 I woke in the half light with the sun about to touch the top of the mountain. I cast off my blankets and proceeded to make my breakfast. As I sat with a steaming cup of tea, I pondered the dream. Perhaps it was not so strange that I dreamed of celestial beings in such an otherworldly place. And then I felt a subtle burning in my breast pocket.