The Red Blaze is the Morning

Day by blazing day Halvorsen stretches himself across a blistering abyss, patiently searching in recalcitrant rock and hot sand for morsels of the useless past, even though he has begun to doubt the meaning and value of his own work. By chilly night, soaking his damaged and aching leg in a shallow basin of tepid sea-water—in this arid part of Turkey, fresh water is a luxury—he feels seductive fingers tickling the membranes of his mind. Something is trying to get in: perhaps already has. Something keeps nestling down alongside his consciousness and whispering fantastic, tempting things to him, visions of far-off times, mighty civilizations yet unborn. Or so it often seems.

What is actually going on, Halvorsen suspects, is that he is beginning to go crazy. The fascination of what’s difficult, he thinks, has not merely dried the sap out of his veins, as old Yeats feared it would, but has parched his brain beyond the bounds of sanity. And yet he can still speak six languages, including Turkish and Hebrew and modern Greek, and he can read Latin and classical Greek besides. He can recite the names of the Roman emperors from Augustus to Romulus Augustulus without missing one. Yes, his mind still functions well enough. Something else, something equally intangible and even harder to define, is what has become impaired. And then there is the sore leg, too, which mended inadequately after last summer’s accident on the rocky slope and is painful all the time. The leg is really in very bad shape. He ought not to be out here on the summit of the hill with a pick and shovel. He should be sitting in his tent, supervising the work of others. But Halvorsen has always been a hands-on kind of archaeologist: a point of great pride for him.

This is the fifth week of the third season of the dig. It is high summer, when the blue cloudless sky reflects the light of the swollen sun like a hot metal plate, and the meltem, the dry, hot, unrelenting wind out of the inland plateau, sends 50-mile-an-hour blasts of brown dust into your nostrils and eyes and mouth and every cranny of your clothing for four or five days without halting. Halvorsen’s site is on a ragged little peninsula in southwest Turkey, overlooking the Mediterranean coast. It is an unimportant place that does not even have a paved road running to it, nor running water or electricity, and yet it has a long history. There is a tiny fishing village here now; before that, there was a Byzantine naval base; before that, Romans; before them, a Greek trading outpost; before that, a Minoan trading outpost; before that, Halvorsen thinks, a proto-Hittite encampment. And before that—ah, nobody knows what was here before that. But Halvorsen has a hypothesis, based on a few scattered and questionable bits of evidence. For three summers, now, he has been trying to find more satisfactory proof to support that hypothesis.

At mid-morning on this blazingly hot day Halvorsen is working alone on high, extending the trench that runs along the proto-Hittite side of the hill. Nobody he knows believes that the Hittites ever lived here, or anywhere else along this coast; and he himself has nothing to go by in that direction except the presence at the highest point of the site of a double line of mud-brick walls, two courses high, that feel more or less Hittite to him. But he is not particularly concerned with the Hittites, anyway: they are a Bronze Age folk, and he is looking for something much more ancient. Still, it would be helpful to prove that the Hittites had passed this way too. And this is his dig. He can call this wall proto-Hittite if he feels like it, at least for the time being.

The site where he is working is a difficult one, steep and precarious. A rainstorm of unprecedented ferocity for this dry coast, six winters back, had carved away half the western face of the hill, laying bare the very finds that had brought Halvorsen here in the first place; but the angle of the lie is practically vertical, the soil crumbles easily, and Halvorsen’s budget will not allow him to put proper bridging across the worst of the gaps. So he hobbles around up here, walking lopsided as it is because of his torn-up leg, testing the ground as he goes in order to make sure it will bear his weight, and fearing at every moment that he will hit a weak spot and go tumbling down in a black cloud to land on the fanged rocks below.

He knows that he ought to be letting his Turks extend this trench for him. But he feels that he is on the brink of a major discovery. How would the workmen be able to detect the place where the terrain changes, and the proto-Hittite stratum gives way to an even older one?

“They’ll know,” Jane Sparmann says. She’s the graduate student from Columbia who has been working with him out here for three years, now. “They may be illiterate laborers, but they’ve spent their whole lives digging in these mounds and they have a sixth sense about any kind of shift in the matrix.”

“Even so,” Halverson has replied whenever this comes up. “I want to do this myself. I have a seventh sense.”

Sparmann laughs. Halvorsen knows that she thinks he is stubborn to the point of irrationality. Very likely Sparmann believes that too many summers under the Mediterranean sun have addled his brain, grand old figure of the field that he is. Well, so be it: she’s probably right. But he intends to do his own digging up here, even so. Moving slowly along the stone base of the mud wall, looking for the precise spot at the end of the proto-Hittite wall where the soil darkens into virginity and then the place just beyond it where, he hopes, the Neolithic occupants of this site had erected their primordial acropolis.

It’s a fine place for an acropolis. No enemies can come upon you unaware, if you have watchmen posted up here. The hill runs athwart the peninsula for five hundred meters, a sharp rocky ridge. Look to the west and you see the smooth blue sea. To the east, you have a long view of the baking dusty plain.

Halvorsen pokes with his pick, scrapes, peers, brushes the dirt aside, pokes again. Nothing. It’s dull work, but he’s used to it. Steady toil, unrelieved boredom, sweat and dust, one clump of dirt and rock after another, poke and sift, move along. He thinks enviously of Schliemann unearthing rooms of golden treasure, Howard Carter shining his flashlight beam into the tomb of Tut-ankh-Amen. But of course they had put in their months and years of dusty boredom too.

“Mudur Bey!” calls a loud rasping voice from below. “Mudur Bey!” His title: “Mr. Director.” The Turks can’t or won’t learn to pronounce his name. With difficulty Halvorsen levers himself upright, leaning on his shovel, and peers down the eastern slope of the hill to the place where Sparmann and three of the diggers are working, over at the edge of the Greek settlement. Ibrahim, his foreman, is standing in the trench, triumphantly holding up a crude buff-colored pot.

“What is it?” Halvorsen asks.

Jane Sparmann, at Ibrahim’s elbow, cups her hand and calls, “It’s full of coins! Athenian owls, some Corinthians, something from Syracuse.”

“Fine,” Halvorsen says, without enthusiasm. “Give him his bonus.”

“You don’t want to see them?”

“Later,” he says.

They always pay the diggers extra for any easily marketable artifacts, to keep them from taking them on their own behalf. The expense is trivial, a hundred liras per coin. Sparmann is excited by the find—she’s still young—but to Halvorsen the coins, and indeed the whole Greek settlement, are merely an irritating distraction. Dozens of Greek coins turn up wherever you put a spade in the ground. As for the stumps of a little temple, the hazy outlines of a marketplace: who cares? The Mediterranean world is full of Greek temples. They bring no news. Halvorsen is looking beneath such things, beyond, behind, searching for the secret from which all this Mediterranean splendor sprang. The unknown progenitor-race, the pivot, the fulcrum on which the magnificence turned as it began the centrifugal outreach of its grandeur.

He returns to his digging.

But almost immediately comes another booming cry from Ibrahim: “Paydos! Paydos!” Time to quit for the lunch-break.

Halvorsen would just as soon go on working while the others knock off. That would be bad form, though: you mustn’t let your workmen think you’re lazy, but it’s not good to seem maniacally compulsive, either. He hobbles down the hill and over to the workshed, where the usual meal of olives, eggs, canned tuna fish, and warm beer is being dispensed.

“How’d things go, Dr. H?” Sparmann asks. She smiles pleasantly—she’s very pretty, actually, though Halvorsen would never dream of laying a hand on her—but her subtext is fundamentally malevolent. She knows damned well how it has gone up there, how it goes all the time. But she is politely maintaining the pretense that he may eventually find something on the hill.

“Starting to look promising,” Halvorsen says. Why not? Hope costs nothing.

This season’s dig has four weeks to go. And then? Will he spend the off season, as usual, raising money for next year’s work, the grant applications, the lecture series, the endless begging among the well-heeled? Not to mention the interminable business of renewing the digging permit, a hassle that was always complicated in unpredictable ways by the twists and turns of Turkish politics. How much easier it would be simply to give up, retire from field work, write some books, find a soft curatorship or chairmanship somewhere.

But that would be an admission of defeat. It had been a calculated risk to propose his theory as openly as he had; if the notion had come from a 40-year-old, the eventual failure to produce substantiation would be accepted by his colleagues simply as a case of a young man’s reach exceeding his grasp, but at Halvorsen’s age any such failure would be an irrevocable mark of decline, even senility, a regrettable third act to such a brilliant career. He didn’t dare abandon his field work. He was condemned by his own insistent hypothesis to stay out here under this glazed blue sky until he found what he was looking for, or else die trying.

“Beer?” someone asks him.

“Please,” says Halvorsen, taking the bottle, though he knows that it will be weary, stale, flat, unprofitable. No surprises there. It is Efes Pilsen, the terrible Turkish beer. Halvorsen would have preferred a Carlsberg; but Copenhagen is a long way away. So he guzzles it, wincing a little, and even has a second one. Warm and weary, yes. Stale. Flat. And definitely unprofitable.

The nights are always strangely cool here, even in summer, with a sharp autumnal edge on them, as though the sun’s intense heat has burned a hole in the atmosphere by day and the place is as airless as the moon after dark. Halvorsen sits apart from the others, reads, broods, sips raki, soaks his sore leg. The archaeologists’ compound consists of two whitewashed cinderblock storage buildings, a work-shed, and six little tents down by the sandy beach where they sleep. Most of the Turkish workmen make their camps for the night on the shallow slopes just back of the dig, covering themselves with leafy branches or threadbare blankets, though some go home on donkeyback to their village five or six miles up the road.

Halvorsen’s assistants—two women, three men, this year— sit outside their tents, waiting for him to go inside and fall asleep. During the season they have coupled off in various spasmodic patterns, as usual, but they try to hide that from him as though he were some sort of chaperone for them. For most of the summer, Halvorsen is aware, Jane Sparmann has been sharing the tent of Bruce Feld of the University of Pennsylvania, and the Chicago girl, Elaine Harris, has been shifting her affections between Martin Altman of Michigan State and the other boy—Riley, O’Reilly, Halvorsen can never remember which—from that university in Ohio. Let them have their fun, Halvorsen thinks: what they do at night is no business of his. But still they wait for him; and at last, though he isn’t sleepy yet, he rises and waves goodnight and limps into his tent.

His body aches, his mind is terribly alert. He stretches out on his cot and prays in the clammy darkness for sleep to take him.

Instead the night-voice, that insinuating, tickling voice in his head that has been so insistently frequent of late, comes to him again and says:

—Here. I want you to see this. This is the Palace of the Triple Queen.

Every word is perfectly distinct. He has never heard the voice with such clarity before.

And this time the words are followed by an image. Halvorsen beholds on the screen of his mind the facade of a many-columned three-terraced structure that might almost be Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir al-Bahri, except that the colonnades fold back upon themselves in topologically implausible ways, as if they were pivoting into some adjacent dimension, and the glowing bas-reliefs along the pediment are utterly alien in style, a procession of slender angular figures interlocking and bending out of focus in the same incomprehensible twisting way. Behind the columns of the topmost terrace lurks some filmy, shadow-cloaked being, barely perceptible except as huge eyes and a ripple of shimmering light, whose frail silvery form nevertheless emanates immense strength and power.

“Who are you?” Halvorsen asks. “What do you want with me?”

—And this, this is the courtyard of the Tribunal of the People in the time of the Second Mandala.

Halvorsen sees a sort of marble beehive, fifty or sixty hexagonal tanks out of each of which rises the face of a huge-eyed hairless figure, more or less human in general outline. They are submerged from their shoulders down in a radiant luminous fluid. Halvorsen is given to understand that these creatures are a single entity in fifty bodies, that in their own era they exerted some kind of high governmental function, that they spent lifetimes of unimaginable length standing in these six-sided pools of nutrients.

—And what I show you now, says the voice, are the ruins of the building known as the Concord of Worlds, which also is of the time of the Second Mandala, and above it the outlying precincts of the City of Brass, constructed thirty cycles later.

Scenes of confused splendor flood his mind. Marble pillars, shining metal slabs inscribed in unknown languages, obelisks of chalcedony, all strewn about as though by a giant’s hand; and, overlying them with a casual disdain, the streets of some rigidly geometrical later city, gleaming with a cruel metallic sheen.

“This is madness,” Halvorsen mutters. He sits up, gropes in the darkness for his sleeping-pills. “Leave me alone, will you? Get out of my mind.”

—I mean no harm.

“Tell me who you are, then.”

—A friend. A colleague.

“I want to know your name.”

—It would mean nothing to you.

This is a new development, actually to be holding a conversation of sorts with this phantom: with himself, to be more accurate. It seems to mark a dismaying advance in his mental deterioration and he finds it terrifying. Halvorsen begins to tremble.

“What do you want with me?” he demands. Shouting out loud, now. Careful, he thinks. The others will hear you and come running, and the secret will be out. Poor old coot has lost his mind. He will beg them to cover it up, and they will promise, but of course gossip travels so quickly in academic circles—

—I want to offer you—to offer you—

Sputter. Hiss. Static on the line. Then silence.

“Come on, damn you, finish your sentence!”

Nothing. Nothing. Halvorsen feels like weeping. He finds a pill. Looks for the water pitcher, finds the raki bottle instead. What the hell. He washes the pill down with a shot of straight raki. Getting suicidal now? he asks himself. The Turkish whiskey burns his throat. Almost at once he feels groggy. He wonders, as the drug and the raki hit him simultaneously, whether he will live to see morning.

But of course he does. After breakfast everyone assembles, Jane Sparmann calls the roll of workmen, a new day’s toil begins. Sweat, dust, sunscreen, bug repellent. And the tools of the trade: picks, shovels, sifting screens, brushes, tape-measures, envelopes, tags, dust-goggles, sketch-pads, cameras. Jane continues to work in the Greek-era trench; Bruce and Martin will be photographing the Minoan level, this season’s central focus, which now has begun to emerge from its overburden; the other two have projects of their own in the Byzantine strata. And Halvorsen painfully ascends the hill for another attempt at unearthing some trace of his long-sought prehistoric civilization.

Business as usual, yes. Another day under the dazzling sun. That fierce light bleaches all color out of everything. Nor is there much in the way of sound: even the surf makes merely a faint snuffling noise here. Two dark puffs of dust to the east are the only blemishes on the brilliant dome of the sky. A stork appears from somewhere and hovers for a long while, wings scarcely moving, surveying the busy archaeologists skeptically from aloft.

Halvorsen, down on his knees, nose to the ground, reaches the end of the brick wall, jabs a probing-fork into the soil, feels the change in texture. It was around here somewhere that the handful of scraggly, badly eroded artifacts of apparent Neolithic origin that had lured him into this project in the first place had been exposed by the storm: a crude bull’s-head in baked clay, a fragment of a double-axe amulet of distinctly un-Minoan style, a painted snippet of what he is convinced was a mother-goddess amulet. Year after year he has cut his way toward this point—delayed for two whole seasons by the discovery of the Hittite wall—and now, almost afraid of the answers he is about to get, he is ready to strike downward into the hill to see what lies five or ten meters beneath the surface. He will need the workmen to do that for him, he realizes. But he will be over them like a hawk, watching every shovelful they lift.

This afternoon—maybe tomorrow—

An unexpected interruption comes just then. From the east, a throbbing sputtering sound, a cloud of dust, a dirt-bike chugging down the rough little road that leads to the site. The workmen wave at him from below, calling out, “Mudur Bey! Mudur Bey!” A messenger has arrived, bringing him a letter from Ankara. Perturbed, Halvorsen makes his way uneasily down from his hilltop. The envelope, soiled and creased, bears the insignia of the Ministry of Education. His fingers quiver a little as he opens it: the Department of Antiquities of the Ministry of Education has jurisdiction over all archaeological digs. Some change must have occurred; and in Turkey all change involving the bureaucracy is change for the worse.

There’s been a change, yes. But perhaps not a problem. Halvorsen scans the letter, purple typescript on manila stock, translating quickly. Hikmet Aytul, the Department of Antiquities official who has charge of all archaeological work in this part of the country—Hikmet Pasha, Halvorsen calls him, because he is so vast and self-important—has resigned. The new superintendent of excavations is a certain Selim Erbek, an assistant curator of a provincial museum further north along the coast. He is making the rounds of his new responsibilities and intends to pay a visit to Halvorsen’s dig in the next two or three days.

“Trouble?” Bruce Feld asks.

Halvorsen shrugs. “I’m not sure. Bureaucratic reshuffling. Hikmet Pasha’s out, somebody named Selim Erbek’s in. He’ll be dropping in to get acquainted with us later in the week.”

“Should we take any special action?” Jane Sparmann wants to know.

“You mean, hide yesterday’s coins?” Halvorsen laughs. “No, no, we play by the rules here. When Selim Bey gets here, we show him everything we’ve found. Such as it is.” He has already debated, briefly and silently, whether he ought to get started on his own penetration of the hill before the new man arrives. Significant finds might produce unpredictable reactions; it might be wiser to take a reading on this Selim Erbek before plunging in. But Halvorsen rejects the idea. He is here to dig and, if possible, find. No sense wasting time trying to outguess the inscrutable bureaucrats.

After lunch he picks Ibrahim, Ayhan, and Zeki as his workmen and finally begins peeling back the hill, after years of anticipation. Halvorsen has worked with these three men over many seasons and trusts them totally, though he watches them closely all the same. They dig carefully and well, using their picks with surgical delicacy, running their fingers through the clods of earth in search of tiny overlooked artifacts before letting the wheelbarrow man carry the sifted dirt away. But there is nothing to find. This part of the hill, despite the fact that a few anomalous artifacts had been found in one corner of it after that monster storm, seems in general never to have felt the imprint of human use. Wherever you dig, around this site, you turn up something, be it Turkish, Byzantine, Greek, Roman, Minoan, whatever. Except here. Halvorsen has magically located the one corner of the place that nobody in the last ten thousand years has seen fit to occupy. It is the utter opposite of his expectations.

Still, there’s always tomorrow.

“Paydos! Paydos!” comes the call, finally, at dusk. Another day gone, less than nothing to show for it.

Lying in the darkness of his tent, Halvorsen waits for the voice to come, and soon enough it is with him.

—I will show you more, if you allow it.

“Go on. Anything you like.”

Halvorsen strives to be calm. He wants to attain numbness in the face of this absurdity. He knows that he must accept the fact of his own unfolding insanity the way he accepts the fact that his left leg will never function properly again.

—These are the ruins of Costa Stambool.

Into Halvorsen’s mind springs the horrific sight of vast destruction seen at a great distance, an enormous field of horror, a barren and gritty tumble of dreary gray fragments and drab threadbare shards that would make a trash-midden look like a meadow, and all of it strewn incoherently about in a willy-nilly chaotic way. He has spent his life among ruins, but this one is a ruin among ruins, the omega of omegas. Some terrible catastrophe has taken place here.

But then the focus shifts. He is able to see the zone of devastation at closer range, and suddenly it appears far from hideous. Even at its perimeter, flickers of magic and wonder dance over the porous, limy soil of its surface: sprites and visitations, singing wordlessly to him of Earth’s immense history and of futures already past, drift upward from the broken edge-tilted slabs and caper temptingly about him. A shimmer of delicate golden green iridescence that had not been visible a moment ago rises above everything and surrounds it.

—This was the City of Cities.

The broken shards are coming to life. The city of Costa Stambool begins to rise into view like a whale breaching the surface of the sea, or like a missile climbing out of an underground silo, or like a vast subterranean tower emerging from its hiding-place in the bowels of the earth. It is an irresistible force as it heaves itself out of the rubble and climbs with a roaring rush to a height Halvorsen can barely calculate.

It is less a city than a single enormous building, incredibly massive at its base and tapering to a narrow, impossibly lofty summit; and it is skinless, wholly without walls, its exterior peeled away on all sides to reveal the layered intricacies of its teeming core. Halvorsen can see a myriad inhabitants moving about within, following the patterns of their daily lives from level to level, from street to street, from room to room.

Bizarrely, the building seems to be standing on edge, its floors at right angles to the ground. But how can that be? It makes no sense. Then Halvorsen realizes that he is being granted a double perspective: somehow he is able to see the interior of the great structure from the side and top at once, a four-dimensional view, piercing downward and upward and backward and forward through the thousands or perhaps even millions of years of the city’s existence. That puts him at ease. He understands how one reads the multifarious layers of a long-occupied site.

The voice in his mind guides him along.

—The walls you see down there, glowing with scarlet phosphorence, are the oldest levels. On top of these are the structures of the Second Mandala, and then the Third. Here you will recognize the Concord of Worlds and the City of Brass. This is Glissade, the pleasure-city of the Later Third. Here is the palace of the Triple Queen; here, the courtyard of the Emperor of All; down here, the cells of the Tribunal of the People.

Everything is as perfect as the day it was built; and yet simultaneously every layer reveals signs of the destruction wrought by builders of later eras, and over everything else are the brutal marks of some climactic onslaught of vandals: the work, Halvorsen is told, of the bestial invaders who at the dawn of the climactic Fourth Mandala brought fire and death to this place.

In awe Halvorsen tours the temples of unknown gods and the palaces of dynasties yet unborn but already forgotten. He stares at a vast marble slab proclaiming some empire’s grandeur in an incomprehensible script. He enters the Library of Old Stambool, and sees iron-bound chests overflowing with what he understands to be books, though they look more like rubies and emeralds. The guiding voice never ceases, identifying for him the Market of All Wonders, the Gymnasium, the Field of Combat, the Tower of the Winds.

Halvorsen has never seen anything like it. He has never so much as imagined anything like it. It is Rome and Babylon and Byzantium and Thebes all at once, raised to the fiftieth power. In this single crushing vision Halvorson feels that he has experienced an entire great civilization, that he has been buried beneath the totality of its immensity.

Then it is gone. As suddenly as it erupted from the ground, the great building subsides into it again, not with a crash but a sigh, a gentle cadence of descent. It falls like a feather on the wind, shrinking down on itself, and within moments Halvorsen sees nothing but the gray field of rubble again.

After a time he says, “Very impressive. I didn’t know I had such powers of invention.”

—They are not inventions. They are the reality of our age, which I freely make available to you.

“And who are you, may I ask?”

—I will tell you. I am an inhabitant of the Fifth Mandala, which is the last epoch of the world you call Earth, very close to the end of all things.

Halvorsen shivers. The lunacy deepens and deepens.

“You live in the future and are reaching back across time to talk to me?”

—The very distant future, yes.

Halvorsen contemplates that for a moment.

Then he says, “Why? What do you want from me?”

—Simply to give you an opportunity to see my world. And to beg you to allow me to see yours. A trade, my time for your time: your body for mine, our minds to change places. I want that very much. I want it more than life itself.

By day none of what he has heard or seen in the night seems real. There is only the brown sandy site, and the unrelenting red blaze of the sun, and the blue sea, and the different blue of the sky’s rigid vault. From the white tents come his young assistants. The workmen have already breakfasted and are waiting for their assignments. “Gun aydin,” they say, grinning, showing big white crooked teeth. “Good morning.” For them this job is a bonanza, the best pay they will ever see. They love it. “Gun aydin, gun aydin, gun aydin.”

The morning’s work begins. Sunscreen, bug repellent, sweat, dust. Picks, shovels, brushes, tape-measures.

So the madness seems to overtake him, he thinks, only by night. Halvorsen wonders about that. Perhaps the power of his quest for understanding the buried past, here in the remorseless brightness of the day, drives off these phantoms of the imaginary future. Or perhaps it is that the monkish solitude and close atmosphere of his dark, stifling little tent invite hallucinations, especially to a tired man who tends to drink too much raki when he is alone. Either way, he is grateful to leave it behind, the craziness, as he stomps toward this new day’s work.

He believes passionately in archaeology as metaphysics. Without true knowledge of the past, how can one comprehend the present, how can one begin to triangulate the future? Of course true true knowledge is impossible, but we can attempt partial truths: we can skin the earth’s surface looking for clues, we can sift and sort, we can postulate. Halvorsen has spent most of his life doing this. What has it gained him? He can recognize the varying soils of differing layers of occupation. He can name the Emperors of Rome from Augustus to Romulus Augustulus, remembering even to include Quintillus and Florianus. He has—what? Five years left? Ten?—to master all the rest of it, to solve all the pieces of the riddle that he has arrogated to himself. Then he will be gone. He will join the vastness of the past, and the work will belong to others. But for the moment it is his responsibility. And so the work goes on, today for him, tomorrow for the Jane Sparmanns, the Bruce Felds. Will they see it as he does? Or will it merely be a job for them, a highway toward the comforts of tenure? How can you be an archaeologist at all, except out of love, an insatiable desire for the truth, the willingness to give yourself up to quests that may all too easily become obsessions?

Halvorsen’s obsessive notion is that Asia Minor and not Mesopotamia was the cradle of civilization. Fertile, with easy access to the Mediterranean, rich in mineral ores, forests, grasslands for grazing, a reasonably benign climate, the peninsula seems to him to have been an ideal site for the transition from Neolithic life to the splendors of the Bronze Age. The flow of conceptualization could only have been down out of Anatolia’s rocky spine, he is convinced: to Sumerian Iraq on one side of the cultural watershed, to proto-Minoan Crete on the other, and onward also to Egypt in the south. But there is no proof. There is no proof. Mere smudges and traces remain, where he needs walls and pillars, inscribed tablets, potsherds, idols, weapons. Time has erased it all here in Anatolia, or at least has erased what he needs to provide a foundation for his bold thesis, leaving only confusion and conjecture.

Still, he is certain that this is where it all began. The Catal Huyuk findings tell him that, the engraved pebbles in the Karain Cave, the rock paintings of Beldibi: this is where the first canto of the great epic was written. But where is the proof? He knows that he is working from a priori hypotheses, always a great peril for a scientist. This sort of thing is the antithesis of the scientific method. He has allowed himself to seem to be a fanatic, a nut, a Schliemann, an Evans, obsessed with obfuscatory special pleading in defense of his idée fixe. Schliemann and Evans, at least, eventually delivered the goods. But he has nothing to show, and soon they will be laughing at him in the halls of academe, if that has not begun already.

Still, he digs on. What else can he do?

It’s a long day. The new trench gets deeper and longer and it’s still absolutely virgin. Thinking incorrectly that he has spotted something significant jutting from its side, Halvorsen jumps eagerly down into it and wrenches his bad leg so severely that he almost bursts into tears, though they are tears of rage rather than pain. Halvorsen is a big, strapping man whose physical endurance was legendary in the profession, and now he is little more than a cripple. If he could, he would have the leg cut off and replaced with something made of steel and plastic.

The raki helps a little. But only a little.

Lying on his back and massaging the throbbing leg with his left hand with the raki bottle in his right one, Halvorsen says into the dense clinging darkness, “How did you find me? And why?” He is somewhat tipsy. More than somewhat, maybe.

There is no answer.

“Come on, speak up! Have you been in touch with others before me? Twenty, fifty, a hundred, a hundred thousand different minds, every era from First Dynasty Egypt to the fortieth century? Looking for someone, anyone, who would go for your deal?”

Silence, still.

“Sure you did. You’ve got a million-year lifespan, right? All the time in the world to cast your line. This fish, that one, this. And now you have me on the hook. You play me. Trade bodies with me, you say, come see the marvels of the far future. You think I’m tempted, don’t you? Don’t you? But I’m not. Why should I be? Don’t I have enough on my plate right here? You think I want to start over, at my age, learning a whole new archaeology? You suppose I need to worry about identifying the strata that signify the fucking Second Mandala?”

No answer. He knows that he is losing control. He never uses obscenities except under extreme stress.

“Well, go fish somewhere else,” Halvorsen says. “I reject your deal. I piss on your crazy deal. I stay here, you stay there, the way God intended it to be. I go on digging in the dirt of Turkey until my brains are completely fried and you sit there amidst all your fucking post-historic apocalyptic miracles, okay? Costa Stambool! You can take Costa Stambool and—”

At last the voice out of distant time breaks its silence.

—Is your refusal a final one?

And, almost in the same moment, another voice from closer at hand, from just outside his tent, in fact:

“Dr. Halvorsen? Are you all right, Dr. Halvorsen?”

Bruce Feld’s voice.

My God, Halvorsen thinks. I’m bellowing and ranting at the top of my lungs, and now they all finally know that I’ve gone nuts.

“I’m—fine,” he says. “Just singing, a little. Am I too loud?”

“If you need anything, Dr. Halvorsen—”

“Maybe another bottle of raki, that’s all.” He laughs raucously. “No, no, just joking. I’m fine, really. Sorry if I disturbed you.” Let them think I’m drunk; better than thinking I’m crazy. “Good night, Bruce. I’ll try to keep it down.”

And then, again:

—Is your refusal final?

“Yes! No. Wait. I have to consider this thing a little, all right? All right?”

Silence.

“God damn it, I need some time to think! —Hey, are you still there?”

Silence.

Gone, Halvorsen thinks. He has given his answer, and the being from the far end of time has broken off the contact, and that is that. Even at this moment the offer is being made to someone of the thirtieth century A.D., or perhaps the thirtieth century B.C., or any of a million other years along the time-line between prehistory and the Fifth Mandala of Costa Stambool. A trade, my time for your time: your body for mine, our minds to change places.

“Listen,” Halvorsen says piteously, “I’m still thinking it over, do you know what I mean? Although I have to tell you, in all honesty, you’d be getting a bum deal. I’m not in really good physical condition. But I want to discuss this proposition of yours a little further before I give you a definitive answer, anyway.”

Nothing. Nothing. An agony of regret.

But then, suddenly:

—Let us discuss, then. What else would you like to know?

The promised visit of the new superintendent of excavations does not occur on the second day after the receipt of the letter from the Ministry of Education, nor on the third. Halvorsen is unsurprised by that. Time moves differently in different cultures; he lives on the Turkish calendar here.

The work is now going so badly that he actually has begun to regard his nightly bouts of madness as comic relief. His leg has swollen, practically immobilizing him; it is so difficult for him to get around now that he is unable to reach his excavation site at the top of the hill, short of being hoisted up there with a sling and pulley. So he supervises fretfully from below. But that makes no difference, because Ibrahim, Ayhan, and Zeki are still digging through virgin soil. Elsewhere all around the site, nice little things are turning up for the others: Riley and Harris have found some bits of Byzantine mosaic in association with coins of the Emperor Heraclius, Feld and Altman have struck an interesting layer of early Minoan sherds, Jane Sparmann has found a cache of glass and terra-cotta beads that may indicate the presence of a previously unsuspected zone of late Greek occupation. The hilltop work, though, is plainly a bust. Hittites, or somebody who built walls in Hittite style, undoubtedly had had a fortress up there four or maybe five thousand years ago, but what Halvorsen is after is some sign of civilization two or three thousand years older than that—some deposit that will convincingly link this coastal outpost to the known Neolithic settlements far to the east at Catal Huyuk—and he has not had the slightest luck. The three anomalous artifacts that that storm had laid bare remain perplexing enigmas, tantalizing, inexplicable.

He consoles himself with conversations in the darkness. The visions of the Fifth Mandala grow ever more baroquely detailed. Halvorsen, who still believes that he is spinning these fantasies within the walls of his own tortured mind, is bemused by the discovery that he has such lavish qualities of imagination within himself. He has thought of himself all along as a prosaic drudge, a plodding digger in musty, dusty ancient realms. Evidently there is more to him than that, a rich vein of the fabulist locked away somewhere. The realization makes him uneasy; it seems to call in question the integrity of his own scholarly findings.

He wants to know about the inhabitants of the remote eon of which his informant is a denizen.

—There are very few of us. I may be the only one.

“You aren’t sure?”

—Contact is very difficult.

“It’s easier for you to speak with someone who lived a million years in your past than it is to pick up the phone and call someone who lives around the corner from you?”

Apparently so. There has been a great cataclysm, an invasion of some sort, a climactic battle: the last and ultimately futile stand of the human race, or rather the evolved and vastly superior successors to the human race, against an inexorable enemy so terrible that its nature seems beyond the abilities of Halvorsen’s informant to communicate. This, it seems, occurred as the closing act of the epoch known as the Fourth Mandala, when humanity, after having attained a supreme, essentially god-like height, was thrust down irreparably into the dust. Now only a few lurkers remain, scuttling through the heaped-up ruins of previous glorious civilizations, waiting for their final hours to arrive. Halvorsen gets the impression that they are not even creatures of flesh and blood, these last few humans, but some kind of metallic mechanisms, low spherical beetle-like housings, virtually indestructible, in which the souls of the remaining inhabitants of Earth have taken refuge.

Some resonant chord in Halvorsen’s Nordic soul is struck by the revelation that there will be a Ragnarok after all, a Götterdämmerung: that all gods must have their twilight, even the supernal beings of humanity’s final epoch. He is saddened and exalted by it all at once. They were beings of a magnificence and power beyond comprehension, a race of glorious heroes, demigods and more than demigods, and yet they fell, even they. Will fall. It is the myth of myths, the ultimate saga. Odin and Thor and Heimdall and Tyr and all the rest of the Aesir will die in the Fimbulwinter of the world, when Fenrir the Wolf breaks his chains and the Midgard Serpent rises and the fire-demons of Muspelheim come riding forth upon the world. So it has been, over and over, and so it must and will be, to the end of time, even into the days of the great Mandalas yet to come.

“Why come here, though?” Halvorsen asks. “We’re only smelly primitives, hardly more than apes. We live in ignoble times. Why not just stay where you are, up there in the grand and glorious final act of the human drama, and wait for the curtain to come down?”

—The curtain has already come down, and it happens that I have lived on beyond it. Where is the nobility in that? I want to close the circle; I want to return to the starting point. Come: take my body. Explore my world, which to you will be full of wonders beyond belief. There will be much for you to study here: our immense past is your immeasurable future. Spend a million years, two million, as long as you like, roaming the ruins of Costa Stambool. And let me take your place in your own era.

“It won’t be a fair trade,” Halvorsen warns again. “You won’t be getting as good as you give.”

—Let me be the judge of that.

“No. Listen to me. I need to have you realize what you’d be getting. Not only are we mortal—do you really understand what that means, to be mortal?—but I’m not even an especially good specimen of my race. I’m getting to be old, as old goes among us, and I feel very tired and my leg, if you know what a leg is, was badly damaged in an accident last year and I can barely hobble around. Besides which, I’ve painted myself into a corner professionally and I’m about to become a laughing stock. You’d be walking into a miserable situation. The way I feel now, even the end of the world would be preferable to the mess I’m in.”

—Is this a refusal of my offer, or an acceptance?

Halvorsen is baffled for a moment by that. Then he understands, and he begins to laugh.

But of course he is aware that the game he is playing with himself, out there along the borders of sanity, is a dangerous one; and he is glad when sleep at last frees him of these fantastical colloquies. When morning comes, he knows, he must rid his mind of all such nonsense and turn his full attention to the trench on the hill. And either find in it the things that he hopes will be there, or else abandon this site at last, confess his defeat, and make his choice between letting himself be pensioned off and humbly petitioning the Turks to allow him to hunt for traces of extreme Anatolian antiquity someplace else. But he ought not to go on diverting himself with these wishful and fundamentally unhealthy dreams of an escape to the Fifth Mandala.

And eventually morning comes, bringing the usual blast of dry heat, the usual clouds of little black flies, and the usual breakfast of hard-boiled eggs, processed cheese, canned sardines, and powdered coffee. Morning also brings, a couple of hours later, the Department of Antiquities’ new superintendent of excavations for this district, Selim Erbek: Selim Bey, as Halvorsen calls him, since in Turkey it’s always a good idea to bestow formal honorific titles on anyone who holds any sort of power over you.

Not that Selim Bey seems particularly intimidating. He is very young, thirty at most, a slender man, almost slight, with sleek black hair. He is clean-shaven except for a narrow mustache and is wearing khaki slacks and a thin green shirt already stained with sweat. And—Halvorsen finds this very strange—Selim Bey’s demeanor, right from the start, is extraordinarily diffident, almost withdrawn. His voice is almost inaudible and he can barely bring himself to make contact with Halvorsen. The contrast with Hikmet Pasha, his big-bellied, swaggering predecessor, could not be more marked.

Halvorsen offers him breakfast. Selim Bey shakes him off.

“May we speak?” he asks softly, almost timidly.

What the hell is this? Halvorsen wonders. “Of course,” he says.

“The two of us, only. Man to man, apart from the others.”

Of his assistants, only Jane Sparmann is within hearing range. Does Selim Bey want privacy, or is he simply uncomfortable around women? Halvorsen shrugs and signals to Jane that she should return to her dig. Selim Bey smiles faintly, a quick crinkling of the corner of his mouth. This is all quite odd, Halvorsen thinks.

He says, “Shall we begin with a tour of the site?”

“You may show me later. We must have our talk first,” says Selim Bey.

“Yes. Certainly.”

The slender little man gestures from the shoreline to the top of the hill. “You have not found, I take it, any additional Neolithic artifacts here, is that correct?”

“Not as yet, no. I’ve only recently begun trenching along the original find site—the proto-Hittite wall up there needed a careful excavation first, you see—and although the work thus far hasn’t been especially rewarding, there’s every reason to expect that—”

“No,” says Selim Bey. “There is no reason to expect anything.”

“Sorry. I don’t follow what you’re saying.”

Selim Bey shifts his weight from one foot to the other. His gaze rests on Halvorsen’s left cheekbone. His prominent adam’s-apple moves up and down like an adolescent’s. He seems about to burst into tears.

He says, after a little while, “I must tell you that the previous superintendent of excavations, Hikmet Bey, did not in fact resign. Hikmet Bey was dismissed.”

“Ah?”

“There were many reasons for this,” says Selim Bey quietly, digging the tip of his boot into the sand as an embarrassed child might do. “His behavior toward his superiors on certain occasions—his failure to file certain reports in a timely way—his excessive drinking—even his handling, I am sorry to say, of his official financial responsibilities. It is a very unfortunate story and I regret to be telling you of such deplorable things. He needs help, that man. We must all hope that he finds it.”

“Of course,” says Halvorsen piously. “The poor man.” He has to choke back laughter. The fat old tyrant, unseated at last! Caught with his hand in the till, no doubt. Pocketing the fees that the tourists pay to get into the museum at Bodrum and pissing the money away on raki and little boys.

“The reason I tell you this,” Selim Bey says, “is that examination of Hikmet Bey’s records, such as they were, brought forth certain revelations that it is necessary to share with you, Dr. Halvorsen. They concern the Neolithic artifacts that were found at this site after the great storms of some winters ago.”

“Yes?” Halvorsen says. He feels some pressure in his chest.

“A small clay bull’s head, a double-axe amulet, a female figurine, all in the Catal Huyuk style.”

“Yes? Yes?”

“I deeply regret to say, Dr. Halvorsen, that it appears that these were authentic Catal Huyuk artifacts, which Hikmet Bey obtained at their proper site many hundreds of kilometers from here through illegitimate channels and planted on this hill so that they would be discovered here by a shepherd boy and eventually brought to your attention.”

Halvorsen makes a husky sound, not quite a word.

Selim Bey rushes onward. “Hikmet Bey knew of your theories, of course. He thought it would be a proud thing for Turkey if they could be proven to be sound. He is correct about that. And so he sought to entice you to return to our land and carry out researches in his area of supervision. But the method that he used to attract your attention was very wrong. I am extremely sorry to inform you of this, and on behalf of my government I wish to offer our profound apologies for this unfortunate if well-meaning deception, for which no justification can possibly be found that can in any way negate the tremendous injury that has been done to you. Again, my deepest apologies, Dr. Halvorsen.”

The young man takes half a step back, as if he expects Halvorsen to strike him. But Halvorsen simply stares. He is without words. His mouth opens and closes.

A hoax. A plant. His head is swimming.

“Pardonnez-moi,” he says finally, unable for the moment to remember how to say “Excuse me” in Turkish. He lurches forward, sending Selim Bey skittering out of his way like a frightened gazelle, and stumbles like a wounded ox down the path that leads to the tent colony along the beach. He moves at a terrible speed, heedless of his injured leg, virtually unaware that he has legs at all: he might have been moving on wheels.

“Dr. Halvorsen? Dr. Halvorsen?” voices call from behind him.

He enters his tent.

I am extremely sorry to inform....I wish to offer our profound apologies....no justification can possibly be found....the tremendous injury that has been done to you....

Right. Right. Right.

The raki provides a kind of quick palliative. He takes a deep pull straight from the bottle, exhales, takes another, takes one more. Good.

Then he kicks off his boots and stretches out on his cot, facing upward. The day’s work is well along, out there on the dig, but he can’t bring himself to return to it. There is no way that he can face the others, now, after what he has just learned.

The impact of Selim Bey’s words is still sinking in. But there is no escaping the fact of his destruction. His theory is empty; he has wasted his time and expended the last of his professional capital on a foolish quest spurred by fraudulent clues.

As the lunch hour nears and Halvorsen still has not emerged from his tent, Feld and Martin Altman and Jane Sparmann come to him to see if he is all right. Even without knowing what it is that Selim Bey has told him, they evidently have guessed that it was highly upsetting news of some sort.

He tries to bluff it through. “There were some little questions about our permit application,” he tells them. “Trivial stuff, nothing to worry about. The usual bureaucratic nonsense.

“If we can help in any way, sir—”

“No need. No need at all.”

Halvorsen realizes, from the way they are looking at him, that they don’t believe a word he has said. They must be able to see the outward manifestations of the shock wave that has coursed through his body, the visible signs of his inner demolition. They can have no doubt now that he has heard something shattering from this morning’s visitor and that he is struggling to conceal it from them. There is a look of deep concern on their faces, but also, so it seems to him, sympathy verging on pity.

That is more than he can bear. He will not let them patronize him. Feld makes one more stammering offer of assistance, and Halvorsen replies brusquely that it is not necessary, that everything is all right, that he can handle the problem himself. His tone is so blunt that they are startled, and even a little angered, maybe, at this rejection of their solicitude. But he has left them no choice but to go. Jane Sparmann is the last to leave, hovering at the door of his tent an extra moment, searching for the right words but unable to articulate them. Then she too withdraws.

So, then. He is alone with his anguish. And the central issue remains. His occupation is gone. He has made himself something pitiable in the eyes of his colleagues, and that is intolerable.

Contemplating his options now in the face of this disaster, he sees that he really has none at all. Except one, and that is an even greater foolishness than the one that has brought him to this sorry shipwreck on the Turkish shore.

Nevertheless Halvorsen voices it, more out of rage than conviction.

He stares at the roof of the tent. “All right,” he says savagely. “It’s daytime here, now, but maybe you can hear me anyway. Are you there? Are you listening? I call your bluff. The offer is accepted. You can take over my life back here, and I’ll take over yours. Come and get me, if you can. Get me right now.”

Nothing happens. Of course not, Halvorsen thinks. What madness.

He remains motionless, listening to the wind. He hears voices outside, but no words, only faint, indistinct sounds. Perhaps that’s the wind too. He feels the faintest of tremors in the tips of his fingers, and perhaps the twitch of a muscle in his cheek, and a certain mild and quickly passing queasiness in the pit of his stomach. That is the raki, he thinks.

“Well?” he says. “No deal, eh? No, I didn’t really think there would be. You were just a fucking hallucination, weren’t you? Weren’t you?”

What else could it have been? he wonders. What else but an old man’s lunatic fantasies? Thoughts of a dry brain in a dry season, nothing more. It was shameful to have made the attempt, even in bitter jest. And now he must get up and go back outside, and formally accept the apologies that Selim Bey has come here to deliver, and explain to the others what has happened, and then go on to pick up the pieces of his life somehow, after all. Yes. Yes. Somehow. He will have to be strong in the face of the humiliation that will be his, but there is no choice. Up, then.

He rises to go outside.

But he discovers as he sets about the process of rising from the cot that he is no longer lying on it, nor is he in his tent, and that in fact he has been utterly changed: in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye. His aging, aching body is gone, and he is a gleaming metallic sphere that moves in a wondrously frictionless way, as if by magic; and when he emerges into the open air from the airless vaulted place in which he has awakened, he enters into a realm of mighty silence, and it is the apocalyptic glories of the Fifth Mandala that he sees under the thin yellow light of evening, the immense tumbled many-layered ruins of the great City of Cities, Costa Stambool, at the end of time.