Tag: Persia

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Essay

The Restoration of Silence

Andriy Nivchuk

 An Abridged Version by Andriy Nivchuk

The phrase “irony of fate” is usually illustrated with the image of a sailor dying of thirst in the desert. Neat. Canonical. But as a mental exercise, one might try to find others, less obvious, less obedient. For instance, history has no grave for Herodotus, the very man whom Cicero, with the confidence of a Roman who knew how to assign paternity, called the father of history.

No tomb. No urn. No reliably identified city where he saw his last sunrise, or survived (or failed to survive) upto his final day. No one knows now. No one knew three hundred years ago. And judging by the silence, no one was particularly eager to know then either.

What remains are versions. Hypotheses. And the thick, practiced silence of old Hellas.

Thurii[1] gave him his second name, his last one, acquired while still alive. Yet, Thurii never returned the favour. No monument. No plaque. No modest column leaning into oblivion. Athens, meanwhile, built him something closer to a pedagogical complex. It was recommended for students who expected from the Lyceum not only rhetorical muscle but moral posture. Almost a museum. Almost a cult.

This asymmetry conveniently feeds the supporters of the so-called Periclean Scraper theory. According to them, Herodotus died not in some conveniently barbarian elsewhere, but in radiant Athens itself. Symbolic. Elegant. As the theory goes, he was removed along with other initiates into Pericles’ grand ideas by men who had begun to feel less like assets and more like liabilities. Or worse, witnesses.

We are not inclined to dignify such conjectures by reinforcing their place in history. Still less to supplement them with later interpolations produced by interested hands. These surface periodically in northern Aegean archives as lists or tables.

Yet one fact remains stubbornly intact. Herodotus was involved in the founding of Thurii.

A “common” colony, raised almost at the site of ancient Sybaris. Almost. Instead of theatrically restoring the legendary city of pleasures and refined excess (the Sybaris that gave its name to an entire philosophy of living), Thurii was assembled in haste, shoulder to shoulder with the ruins.

It was populated by Athenian volunteers, new settlers, descendants of Sybarites by blood or coincidence. Every day they walked through the ruins of yesterday. Every evening they returned to today. Dour, makeshift Thurii, assembled without taste or patience, it was like a punishment for former luxury.

The only unresolved detail was the addressee of that punishment.

Herodotus’ role in the final phase of Athenian democracy remains opaque. So opaque that one is tempted to suspect the opacity was the point. Too many moments in his biography coincide neatly with zones where documents stop leaving footprints. From fragments, partial transcripts, unsigned notes, and a couple of discreetly scraped tablets, the following version has been reconstructed. Its coherence is provisional. Responsibility for interpretation rests with the reader.

Pericles ( 495BCE–429BCE), Ancient Greek statesman and general.
Herodotus (484 BCE – 425 BCE), Ancient Greek historian and geographer
From Public Domain

Pericles acted with the confidence of a mature servant of democracy. His concept of an external threat (Persia) was remarkably versatile. It justified emergencies, softened expansion, and wrapped ambition in collective security. The threat itself worked better than any actual invasion. While others clung to the marathon, Pericles spoke of the future. A unified alliance of poleis, decisions made swiftly, centrally, and preferably in his office.

In practice, matters were simpler. The democratic faction wanted more. Territory, tribute, votes in foreign councils. Everything else was rhetorical upholstery. Their opponents could read subtext too, so Pericles began by clearing the flanks at home. The Areopagus was “reformed,” officially. Thucydides and his circle were removed next, with minimal explanation and maximum finality.

In the end Pericles remained one of the ten Strategoi[2], exactly as the constitution prescribed. But he alone decided. The others attended meetings, signed when prompted, nodded often. Formally, it was a democracy. In reality, a political singularity noticed by everyone and addressed by no one, because addressing it would have required rewriting the rules.

Only then could the Idea of a greater Hellas[3] be carried beyond the sacred city.

Herodotus arrived in Athens the way one arrives when one’s biography has already begun to resemble the synopsis of a tragedy. Still negotiable, but increasingly reluctant to change genre. There had been an attempted coup in Halicarnassus. It failed, but failure in Athens was judged alongside the elegance of the leap itself. Exile followed. He sailed with the Athenian fleet. More excursion than service, but the checkbox mattered. What he brought back was not heroism so much as stories, trimmed, calibrated, arranged with care. Athens was perpetually hungry for narratives, especially those that began as personal experience and ended as matter of state.

Pericles learned of him long before shaking his hand. By their first meeting, Herodotus had already been tested in conversation, whetted at banquets, evaluated through third parties of both sexes and varying loyalties. When Pericles finally invited him, first informally, then into his office, Herodotus was already half-installed. They spoke like men who had been reading the same books for years and drawing incompatible conclusions. Herodotus offered careful directness, still marketable. Pericles listened, then made the small, economical gesture Athenians read fluently. This man would be allowed closer.

From that moment on, Herodotus ceased to be merely a gifted interlocutor and became part of the infrastructure. His notes were quietly reclassified as “auxiliary material for decision-making.” He began to appear at discussions of issues that officially did not exist, meetings without agendas, where unrecorded questions were discussed and ideas could not to be seen walking alone in daylight.

It was elegant. Herodotus believed he was being heard. Pericles ensured he was being used. Athens congratulated itself on the illusion of mutual benefit. In conversations with Pericles and those nearest to him, Herodotus eventually let slip two places that unsettled him by their scale, precision, and absolute dissimilarity to anything he had encountered among any monuments created by human.

It was an even octagonal platform, a night’s march east of Tyre, made of marble cracked by age, yet laid so carefully, and on such a foundation, that no one, however motivated, managed to pry out blocks or grind it down into reusable rubble. The vacant expanse, roughly the size of four Athenian quarters, stubbornly refused conversion into cheap building material. And also a pyramid sunk deep into sand, referred to as Shaytep by locals. Later it was imitated with scholarly enthusiasm by Egyptians who inherited the territory above it. Its accessible chambers suggested the scale of a ten-story palace, if such a structure could ever make sense as habitation. Immense, curiously pointless, poorly translated allegories, it had the same heavy geometry, the same sensation that it was not built for people.

The locals knew nothing. Those who called them tombs did not argue with those who believed them to be stations of the gods. But one detail struck Herodotus as well as Egyptians, Persians, border tribes – all speaking different tongues had the same conviction –  structures like these existed elsewhere.

No one had seen them. No one had mapped them. Yet everyone “knew” they must be there. Drunken sailors’ tales from the inhospitable north. Evening stories about distant shores of the Pontus. No names. No coordinates. Only background noise, the shadow of something once called knowledge.

Then there was Lampon, a seer, a priest, an interpreter of higher meanings knew how to speak with the gods or at least how to simulate the effect convincingly. In Athens he was respected not as a person but as a function. He had a lifelong right to dine in the Prytaneion, where the Council of Five Hundred formalised the will of the people. Lampon had access without election as he was said to have authority delegated directly from the sky. His task was to ensure no decision passed that might anger Olympus. A dizzying appointment for a supervisor overseeing assemblies theoretically designed to lack any single supervisor.

Lampon stayed close to Pericles, intimately close. Either Pericles believed in signs, or he understood the value of myth and knew how to deploy it. The two are not mutually exclusive. On the square, the people saw a priest and heard a voice as to who stood behind that voice remained speculation.

It was almost certainly Lampon who conceived the idea, layered like honeyed pastry. He compiled all reports of megalithic structures, convened a council of moderately learned men to interpret them, dispatched colourfully dressed priests with sombre escorts to the empire’s edges. And made the big announcement.

Athens, the statement would go, had recovered forgotten pre-literate knowledge. The knowledge of how to turn piles of stone into defensive infrastructure. Or, with fewer syllables, a wonder-weapon. Against it, Persian arrows and anonymous triremes would amount to little more than wind in a vineyard.

Domestically, it was signal geometry. Parallelograms of fact intersecting triangles of legend, with the Athenian party standing at the centre beneath the slogan. We read stone better than anyone. Anyone asking unnecessary questions simply would not be invited to the next symposium.

Externally, it was never about hoisting a catapult atop a pyramid. It was about saturating every diplomatic front with a myth. Athenian hegemony was not merely foreign policy. It was access to ancient knowledge, to a power beyond imagination.

Beneath the ornamentation lay the real goal – to ensure recalcitrant polies[4] would arrive voluntarily, bread and butter in hand, at a confederation where Athens controlled the bread, the butter, and the ledger.

Pericles did not merely approve Lampon’s hypothesis. He sealed it with an official nod and an unofficial proceed until it smoked. Marketability mattered more than the truth. If more than three neighbouring poleis believed it, it would cease to be a local myth and begin to function.

Herodotus received two sets of instructions. The written one was to collect and systematise material on the Greco-Persian Wars. Paperwork for the Academy and the gullible. The oral one was simpler – to locate traces of the “ancients” across the edges of the oikoumene[5], and try not to damage them too badly while taking measurements.

What would be done with the material was not explained, not out of mistrust, but pragmatism. Knowledge without leverage becomes ballast. And Herodotus already carried enough weight — nobility. faith in democracy coupled with dependence on his own authorial voice. Throughout the expedition, whose geography we know in exhausting detail, he sent Lampon encrypted reports with exemplary regularity about the locations of structures of titanic scale and improbable forms.

The earliest reports were meticulous, almost embarrassingly enthusiastic. As if he were seeking revelation in massive forms. He analyzed slab placement, light behavior, hypothetical priestly processions, even the dietary preferences of imagined builders. But by the eighth object the style thinned. By the tenth it collapsed into two lines, as if the text itself had grown embarrassed.

Geodesy and geometry remained precise. His team continued to perform duties in full compliance with instructions and payroll. But metaphors vanished. Comparisons evaporated. The rhetoric crumbled. The stones remained. The words did not.

Lampon followed the change with mounting concern. Some blamed fatigue, barbarian cuisine, women insufficiently trained in Hellenic desire. But Lampon was not convinced.

Herodotus’ second arrival in Athens was calm, without excessive praise. His report to Lampon was scheduled without urgency, for the evening. The time when architecture becomes philosophy and political maneuvering turns into liturgy. This meeting has been  reconstructed below as per the authors’ assumptions.

“We’ll pour the wine ourselves,” Lampon smiled. “So, did you bring us an oracle from the barbarians?”

“I did,” Herodotus said. “The oracle, and the barbarians.”

He did not elaborate.

Lampon pressed gently. Herodotus replied, almost apologetically. “I’m avoiding language. When you try to describe what was created outside description, you don’t move closer to understanding. You build a private labyrinth of words and find a sign reading Museum Closed.”

“At first there were words,” he admitted. “Epithets. Analogies. Cyclopean observatories. Celestial surgery. Shafts draining souls to Sirius. But these similarities are projection phantoms. My culture reflected onto something without a reflective surface.”

Lampon asked what changed.

“We see a monument like an unsolved equation and immediately insert familiar context,” Herodotus said. “Circle means cult. Twelve means zodiac. Stone means ancestors lacked better materials. And we’re satisfied because we’ve obtained an answer that stops thought. That isn’t research. It’s mental self-fertilization.”

“So you went looking for a different answer?”

“No. A different question.”

A pause, then. “If you want to understand a shadow, you don’t stare at the object. You examine the source of light. I looked at the invisible craftsmen. At the light they emitted so we could amuse ourselves by drafting plans in the shade of their buildings.”

“How do you encode emptiness?” he added. “The impulse faded. I accepted the emptiness as it was. And I began to write accordingly. As a witness, not an apologist.”

Then, unexpectedly clear, as though rehearsed to the point of premiere. “They caught the wind not for movement, but for taste.”

“That’s all?”

“I found not an explanation,” Herodotus said, “but an understanding. That if among the ancestors there was one whose mischief outweighed his fear, he said: let’s place the stones like this. By the stars. Or the other way around.”

“And others followed,” he continued. “Not because they understood, but because it felt exciting. Amusing. New. And it spread, like a fire no one meant to light, but everyone enjoyed feeding.”

Lampon pressed. “You reduce the work of titans to a game?”

“A game,” Herodotus shrugged. “Or play. Or fashion. Rituals without gods. I searched for depth where there was only the width of a moment. Sometimes a dolmen is just a dolmen. The imprint of laughter that has gone silent.”

Lampon looked inward, auditing the contents of his guest’s soul. He found no deceit. Herodotus had tried earnestly to assign cult and function to chaos. Each new structure replied: “No. Nothing. Calm down.”

By the tenth, the traveler had calmed down.

In practice, however, Thurii happened.

The initiative came from the democrats, formally from Pericles’ associates, informally perhaps from Pericles himself. Here the fog thickens. Was this merely bureaucratic arrhythmia, or the final phase of a longer operation? The sponsor colony’s paradox remained. It did not eclipse Sybaris. It multiplied despair by forcing a daily view of its ruins.

It was there that Herodotus acquired his enduring epithet, the Thurian. It was there, tradition says, that he unified his Histories, at least in the “recommended” reading. The sequence gently guides an inexperienced reader toward the conclusion that the author prioritised events that glorified Hellas. Everything before appears as clay, material to be kneaded into anonymous coating for tablets meant to record the “truly significant” milestones.

Later editors, we now know, divided the work into nine books. Another irony. A life devoted to weaving disparate accounts into a chain. Successors dismantled it into links, then displayed them in whichever sequence proved momentarily convenient.

For a time Athens mentioned Thurii only occasionally, as one recalls a long dinner with dull relatives. Then something occurred to pull Herodotus back into the field of managerial imagination.The answer is disarmingly prosaic.

The old man decided it was time. Not to die. To speak.

Publicly. Before an audience. With scrolls and a lectern, and that expression professional speakers wear just before and do you know what else? Publication was discussed. Workshops began calculating margins.

Word of this reached Lampon not as a fresh wind but as a warm exhalation of antique panic. Ready for readings was enough. He knew how easily Herodotus could forget the boundary between narration and confession when listened to attentively. The danger was not a direct accusation. Herodotus was no enemy. Far worse, he was a witness. In the vortex of his diegesis[6], scraps of geography, personal reflections, unapproved versions could be swept together. Everything Pericles had ordered to be formulated, but not pronounced.

The decision was swift. Herodotus was summoned to Athens. The pretext was patronage. A chair. An audience. A laurel wreath and a lifetime bust. Perfect timing. If there were readings, let them occur at the center of the world.

And on the way back, a stone, rain, a robber, a horse — the classic, well, age after all. In modern terms, something we would call prevention. The Greek lexicon offered a more refined word. Hygiene. If nothing else, the Hellenes knew how to keep a narrative clean. Thus, according to proponents of the Scraper theory, the true story of Herodotus ends. Pericles methodically erases associates from the commemorative board.

His work survived, though not without excisions, and the factual foundation thinned accordingly. Speculation about conjecture and truth continues to feed professional unmaskers.

Pericles never obtained his diplomatic wonder-weapon. No column trembled under an egregore’s vibration. Instead, two blocs of poleis emerged, welded by paranoia and ambition, and the Peloponnesian War followed. An internal conflict of unprecedented scale, like a culinary dispute between the two heads of a single serpent.

As if that were insufficient, a plague disembarked in the Piraeus — classical symptoms with a metaphysical aftertaste. Pericles himself exited through an emergency door politely opened by the Queen of Epidemics.

Lampon, however, seems to have drawn a different conclusion — divine retribution for attempting unauthorised access to the gods’ toy chest. He dissolved his name into topical comedies and administrative archives.

Time, as is well known, is not the enemy of knowledge, but its only victor.

The pyramids sink deeper each year, as if the earth were ashamed of their nakedness. Island statues once mistaken for fallen heroes increasingly resemble quirks of terrain. The blurrier the outline, the freer the hypothesis. The fewer the features, the louder the voices eager to explain.

Perhaps this is how history repaid Herodotus. Monuments built in the style of titans (?) simply fade just as the meaning of their existence once faded, just as Herodotus of Thurii himself faded, leaving behind only a controversial image.

Sometimes that is a form of immortality.

Sometimes, the only one.

.

[1] Ancient Greek city

[2] Greek military general

[3] Ancient name of Greece

[4] Ancient Greek city-states

[5] Civilized, the known or inhabited part of the world

[6] Narrative

Andriy Nivchuk is a Ukrainian-born author with a background in IT engineering. He spent fifteen years working as an artistic photographer in Paris and now lives in Ukraine.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Bibliography

Herodotus (life, association with Thurii, traditional framing of the Histories)

Encyclopaedia Britannica: “Herodotus” (overview; biography and the tradition connecting him to Thurii; general context)
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Herodotus-Greek-historian

Cicero’s “father of history” attributionCroALa / Latin text of Cicero, De Legibus 1.5 (commonly cited locus for “Herodotus, father of history”)
https://croala.ffzg.unizg.hr/eklogai/capsa/cic-leg-1-5-1-9/

Thurii as an Athenian-backed “panhellenic/common” colony near Sybaris; Herodotus in the tradition of its founding

Encyclopaedia Britannica: “Thurii” (founding context; location near Sybaris; standard summary of the colony)
https://www.britannica.com/place/Thurii

Athenian political dynamics in the Periclean period (power consolidation as described by ancient biographical tradition)

Plutarch, Life of Pericles (ostracism of Thucydides son of Melesias; Pericles’ dominance in politics—useful for the political atmosphere the story draws on)
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Plutarch%27s_Lives_(Clough)/Life_of_Pericles

Areopagus “reform” and democratic reconfiguration (mid–5th century context)

Encyclopaedia Britannica: “Areopagus” (summary of the council and the traditional account of the curtailing of its powers)
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Areopagus-Greek-council

Athenian institutions referenced in the story (Council of Five Hundred; civic machinery)

Encyclopaedia Britannica: “Council of Five Hundred” (Boule; function and structure)
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Council-of-Five-Hundred-ancient-Greek-council

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

Click here to access Monalisa No Longer Smiles on Amazon International

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Stories

Ali the Dervish

By Paul Mirabile

Whirling Dervishes, painting by Jean Baptiste Vanmour (1671-1737). From Public Domain

In 1976, I bought a small country cottage very pleasantly located near the town of Sheffield at Dronfield in South Yorkshire from an elderly woman who informed me she that had travelled quite extensively throughout Asia in the nineteen twenties and thirties before settling down here. She never married. The learned woman left no forwarding address.

Settling in took much time and energy because of my abundant belongings. At last, one rainy afternoon having nothing to do, I climbed the shaky stairway that led to the garret. The door had been left ajar. Inside the low-ceiling, ill-lite space, there was nothing but a large chest placed in the middle. The lid lay aslant. Its hinges were broken. 

Curious about its contents, I began rummaging through the numerous newspaper and magazine clippings, booklets, letters and other documents. A particular envelop caught my eye because the red wax seal had been broken. Wax-sealed letters are very out-dated these days. When I opened the envelop I understood why it was sealed. A seven-page letter had been written in fine, elegant script, by Lady Sheil, dated 1869. Lady Sheil was quite a prominent woman in her time[1] . This indeed was a remarkable find. It baffled me why the former proprietor would leave in a chest of documents a letter of such archival interest. Since there was little light in the garret, I took the letter downstairs to read it. Unfortunately there was no addressee, so I assumed it was sent to the former proprietor. I must confess that a feeling of guilt touched me when I began my reading. Luckily I overcame this sensation because the contents of the letter proved extraordinary …

Lady Sheil details a very peculiar adventure of an Englishman who named himself Ali the Dervish -or as she spelt it, Deervish — who had undertaken a voyage to ‘Balochestan, Persia’[2]. As I read through her letter, I came to realise that the Englishman had abandoned his British ways entirely, adopting those of the semi-nomad Balochi. To such an extent was his assimilation that he even married a Balochi woman, something utterly unthinkable at that time — in the year 1856. Why Lady Sheil would write a long letter about this chap to an unknown reader or readers heightened my curiosity.

I began investigations at the Sheffield library and found Lady Sheil’s Glimpses of Persian[3] though I found nothing at all about Ali the Dervish. Lady Sheil mentioned something about his diary but nothing substantial came of this. Be that as it may, the letter fascinated me by its mysterious allusions and ellipses, especially concerning this unusual identity change. Not a simple task for a European in the nineteenth century, or even in our century for that matter. This Ali even outdid Sir Richard Burton’s bursts of outlandish impersonation …

Examining the letter carefully, I felt a strange, slight tremor goading me to do justice to this eccentric Ali. Something unsaid in the sentences urged me to read between them, to scrutinize the margins and the paragraph indents as if Lady Sheil had deliberately left out parts of her narrative for her reader to fill in those blank, yellowing spaces.

I picked up my pen, imagining myself to be both Lady Sheil and Ali the dervish, and began filling in the those blanks, writing in the gaps, the lacuna, the untold events and details so to speak. Indeed, I had convinced myself that the letter had been destined for me. And this resolution was enough for me to divulge the mystery of Ali …

Ali, whose English-born name was left unknown, had had the best of aristocratic educations in the fine arts, especially languages. He was fluent in Hindustani, Persian, Pashtun and Turkish, besides having mastered four or five European languages, including Hungarian. This was quite a linguistic feat, second only to Richard Burton whom, by the way, Ali had the occasion to meet in Lahore. A meeting which lasted two or three weeks according to a friend of Burton’s memoirs. Little, however, is reported about their relationship.

Prior to Ali’s arrival in India and that fortuitous encounter with Burton, he apparently had led a rather lukewarm existence in England, and this in spite of his family wealth, or perhaps because of it. His accumulation of capital was analogous to his successive accumulations of prolonged bouts of depression. They left him utterly exhausted. How and when he left England is not written in the letter, although he probably reached India by ship, then on horseback or foot into Northwestern India, accompanied often by erring minstrels and story-tellers. From whom Ali learned the art of dancing, chanting and story-telling. It was not a question of imitating these rituals and customs. Ali had integrated them as if they had been part of some distant, latent self that required jolts of recollection to surge up from the depths of the unconscious. In fact, Burton was quite taken aback by Ali’s very ‘unEnglish’ appearance. His manner of speaking English, too, possessed a curious twist of Persian and Hindustani syntax — a ring of their tonal stress.

To Ali’s pleasant surprise, he no longer suffered from bouts of violent depressions. The former Englishman on leaving Burton, perhaps in 1849, rid himself of paper money, donating it to missionaries, then rode off into the verdant valleys of North-western India towards Afghanistan carrying only the clothes on his back, two gourds of fresh water, several loaves of acorn-bread and a pouch of Arabic gum. Ali carried no weapon.

Ali’s sound knowledge of Hindustani, Pashtun and Persian offered him unparallel glimpses of these undomesticated lands. Lands of shifting desert sands whose rising heat conjured in the distance illusions of ravishing oases and sparkling cascades off tree-laden crags. Ali had been warned about these deceitful mirages (by Burton?) whose marvellous vision had been the death of many a brave adventurer.

He kept to the clayey track, accepting food and board from the hospitable villagers or sleeping under the silver stars on his woven kilim-saddle cloth. He rode days or nights penetrating landscapes of indescribable beauty, of terrifying singularity, of unbearable heat in the day and equally freezing nights. At one point in his wanderings, Ali, slumbering on his horse due to the rising heat and lack of food, looked up to discover a gigantic Buddha hewn into a tuft-like cliff. A small stream ran in front of the lithic niche along which flourished many date trees. There the Buddha stood, calm, reposed, sedentary, encased in his stone casket, home to a myriad birds who had made their nests on his rounded shoulders and shaven head. Ali jumped off his horse, filled his gourds with clean water, scouted about for fresh dates. With one last look at the towering Enlightened One he set off towards Persia, filled with equivocal sensations. He felt that his nomad days would soon be numbered …

A month or two passed. Now villagers tilling their fields or collecting wood no longer greeted or spoke Pashtun to him, but in Dehwari or Persian. He welcomed this language shift. Ali felt more at ease in Persian, albeit it be the Dehwari dialect, which he had learnt from one or two erring Zarathustrian talebearers in India. By then his uncombed beard touched his chest and his hair his shoulders. In one village he traded his khaki-coloured shorts for a shalwar[4] and his boots for goat-skin sandals. In another his Safari sun hat for a turban and his heavy flax shirt for a long, cotton tunic. Whenever he met tillers or merchants they would greet him with the customary ‘hoş amati’[5]. By their pronunciation and vocabulary Ali knew he was travelling southwards into Balochestan. Temperatures rose and rose — 37° C … 42° C. His horse trotted slower and slower. Her rider drooped soporifically over her mane. Ali no longer calculated his wanderings in farsakhs[6] but by the risings and settings of the sun …

Notwithstanding these discomfitures, the persevering Ali carried on. To his delight the track widened, hospitable shepherds driving before them their herds of sheep or goats offered the solitary traveller the warmth of their camp-fires, goat’s milk, cheese and acorn-bread. Caravans of transhumance nomads pressing towards the high plateaus nodded to him. The stony-faced herdsmen chanted in their own language which translated means —

 A breath of mountain breeze,
A breath of wind from the Sea,
In the middle,
We trudge
The pilgrims of the fountain…

Then they called after their huge, savage dogs. Ali seized upon that admirable chant and intoned it to himself or aloud …

One sparkling, azure day, Ali, road-weary, alighted from his horse in a large settlement of tents, called Sa’idi. There both Persian and Dehwari were spoken, judging from the scores of people who came to greet him. It was a charming settlement, surrounded by fields of red poppies, iris, bluer than the blue of the sky, crown imperials whose orange tints glowed like lit candles, and tulips. Horses, sheep and goats dotted the terraced rows of poppies on the hills and skirts of the low-laying piebald mountains, motionless. Ali, both dazzled and comforted by the undulating kaleidoscope colours decided to halt for the night in this welcoming settlement to rest his fatigued physical and mental state and his horse.

When he asked for the elder of the settlement, he was directed to a very large white tent. In fact, since his arrival the snowy-bearded elder had been eyeing the stranger askance. He threw open the flap of his tent and greeted him in Persian as custom would have it, inviting his visitor inside for tea. Sipping their respective glasses of sugared tea, the snowy-bearded elder’s deep-set black eyes peered into those hazel-brown of Ali’s. Though he was pleased to meet this curious traveller, he was confused about his identity. Finally he put the question point blank to his sipping visitor: “Are you Persian?”  

Ali nodded neither yes nor no. His ambiguous nod set off the string of events that followed. events that transformed the already transforming Ali into a rather ambiguous Other …

The snowy-bearded elder had read that ambiguous nod as a sign of belonging. Ali’s sun-mat complexion, his extraordinary command of both Persian and Dehwari, his knowledge of social and religious habits and practices, mostly acquired during his years on the road, opened the elder’s heart and those of the Balochi people of Sa’idi, people who now had stepped into the tent, forming a large circle round Ali and the snowy-bearded elder. Out of this wide circle came the elder’s three sons and daughter to lead him to his own red tent at the outskirts of the settlement. His horse was led to pasture with the others.

On the thick carpets of his medium-sized tent, Ali sat and meditated upon that ambiguous nod. Had he really become the one of them? Deep within his heart, the former Englishman rejoiced … rejoiced at his ‘crossing over’. He had become what he really was …  

Several years passed. Ali no longer felt guilty about leaving his past behind. His immersion seemed complete. He sang and danced round the ritual fire at night. He told stories night after night after a hard day’s work in the poppy fields, apple and peach orchards and the vineyards, the tribesmen chanted their chants of ancestral lore, joined him in his whirling dance, one palm to the Heavens and the other to the Earth, eyes staring into a void of quiescence …

It was in Sa’idi that he began to be called Ali the Dervish, whirling as he did before and behind the leaping flames. Ali taught his dance to the snowy-bearded elder’s three sons. In turn, the elder offered his daughter to him in marriage — a privilege since this signified entrance into the chieftain’s family.

Once the three-day marriage ceremonies were over, his lovely bride — for she was truly lovely — sat next to him in the nuptial red tent. His wife, whose name has never been recorded, demanded nothing of him. She accepted all his nightly hesitations … ‘failings’ … Her fruity laugh and obsidian back eyes spoke a language that communicated higher values … loftier treasures than uncertainty, physical gratification or hereditary obligations.

Ali slowly discovered that his young bride possessed the quality of a seer, perhaps even belonged to a long lineage of Central Asian mystics. Intense were her meditations and visions of the Other World, of events passed and those to come … His past … Their future … Ali, both bewildered and beguiled by this power of prophesy, would timidly question his bride about her unusual gifts. She would answer enigmatically: “One must remove the Husk before bringing in the Bride,” an adage he never fully understood, nor would she ever elucidate.

On other moonlit nights, alone within the sanctuary of their intimacy, Ali’s wife would envision scenes of his long aristocratic lineage, each member afflicted by physical or mental atrophies, plagued by wasting ennui. The Dervish listened in awe as she revealed events quite unknown to him. Yet, he remained speechless, peering into the almond-shaped eyes of this woman depicting scenes that could very well cost him his life. She said nothing. He yearned to avow everything to her but some fey voice prevented him each time. She read his mind and laughed her fruity laugh, delving ever deeper into his life … theirs !

Ali accompanied her with his eyes then turned them to the dying embers of the stove fire, the glowing logs sizzled lightly in the silence. Was he deluding himself? He knew that his wife had discovered his native idenity. But were all those past scenes his true identity? He indeed stemmed from that hoary lineage, the last scion. Was he the last to play a role on this world stage of masquerade and mummery? No ! He was Ali the Dervish … Here amongst these hearty tribesmen he played no role. He had overcome the hardships of childhood as a fatherless boy. That unknown gentleman had left for Africa never to return! Never a letter nor a message brought by acquaintances. Before dying of grief, his poor mother repeated to him everynight: “Look to the stars.” And the sullen boy looked, and believed that they would lead him to another life … another identity !

Once Ali began to cry softly listening to the sizzling embers and the light, rhythmical breathing of his strange wife.

Many years had passed and yet, they had no children. His hair and beard had greyed. Yet, no reprimand, no rebuke, no judgement ever came from the community, especially from her aging father. Was the power of her revelations known to him ? Would he be the last branch of that gnarled and rotten aristocratic tree ?

Ali rode often into the fields and mountains to gather wood to build tent-frames or glean fruit from the many apple and peach trees. During these solitary moments his past crept up on him, making him feel guilty. There seemed only one solution : speak openly, candidly to his wife about his British birth, his genuine desire to become the Other. She would surely understand since she had already read his former life by sounding his heart. That night he would go straight to his wife.

But, just then out of the blue sky his wife came galloping towards him, whipping up her stead. She jumped off, an odd expression wrinkling her forehead. Ali ran up to her, took her shoulders gently, admiring the sapphire blue that framed them so perfectly like a painting. There she stood, basking in the soft glow of the mellowing, evening sun. Before he could utter his rehearsed confession she put a hand to his lips.

“Father has just passed away,” she whispered softly, without emotion. “He has been freed from the trammels of worldly existence.” She smiled. “Now you too are free to divest yourself of a personage that has been conferred to you by the stars and the strength of your will.”

“But who am I really, my dear?” her husband wondered. She caressed his bearded, burning cheeks. She answered: “If you want the horse to neigh, you must slacken the reins.” Turning round, she rode back to the settlement to wash the body of her deceased father and prepare the three-day funeral rites with her brothers. Ali puzzled by that enigmatic counsel trudged to his horse.

He rode back far behind her, meditating his ‘freedom’. What other choice had he?

This sentence was the last in Lady Sheil’s long, detailed letter. On further investigation into this strange fellow at the London library, I discovered that Ali the Dervish had divorced and remarried his bride to one of her brother’s mates, then left Sa’idi. He was last seen in Tabriz, Persia. No document reports his whereabouts after his reaching that northwestern town in the lands of the Azeri people. 

I have often wondered whether Lady Sheil ever knew who Ali the Dervish really was. I have my doubts. Only his Balochi wife knew, and of course, that mysterious person could have never been questioned. It’s also odd that Ali himself — whatever self that be– had never woven his thoughts and experiences into a book, never enlightened a Western public on integration and assimilation into a foreign culture.

As time went by I even considered that this letter might have been a hoax to hoodwink a naive fellow like myself into clothing Ali in legendary fashion. On second thought, though, who’s to arbitrate between fact and fiction ? Not I, in any case. For isn’t it a refreshing act of freedom to slip from one to the other without a pinch of guilt ?     

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[1]        1803-1871.

[2] Balochistan is in Pakistan but the Baloch community spreads to Iran and Ali’s story dates before the formation of Pakistan.

[3]        Published in 1856.

[4]        Large, light baggy trousers.

[5]        ‘Welcome’ in Persian.

[6]        A Persian measurement equivalent to 5.35 kilometres

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Paul Mirabile is a retired professor of philology now living in France. He has published mostly academic works centred on philology, history, pedagogy and religion. He has also published stories of his travels throughout Asia, where he spent thirty years.

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Categories
Poets, Poetry & Rhys Hughes

The Chopsy Moggy*

Courtesy: Creative Commons

I sat down to write a new story and as I did so, I thought aloud: “I want it to be about a talking cat,” and much to my surprise my own cat, who happened to be crouching on my desk, shook her head.

Then she said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why not?” I wanted to know.

“It’s corny and a cliché. It has been done too many times before. It’s twee and awfully sentimental. Childish too.”

“I feel rather discouraged now,” I admitted.

“Oh, don’t take it so badly. You can write my story, if you like. Just don’t say I’m a talking cat when you do.”

“And what is your story? I knew you when you were a kitten. You haven’t done much since then, to be honest.”

“You are wrong. My life has been dramatic.”

“I don’t call sleeping most of the day and sitting in boxes very exciting. In fact, your ability to talk is by far the most interesting thing about you. If I can’t mention that, why should I bother?”

“You don’t know what I get up to at night. But I will tell you. Pick up your pen and get ready to make notes.”

I did as I was bid and my cat began…

You are generally fast asleep (she said) when I go off on my adventures. There’s a rug in the lounge that is a magic carpet. You don’t know this because you have never tried to activate it. Scratching it in a certain way, pulling out threads here and there, makes it fly. I discovered all this by accident, of course. It was a night last spring and you had left the window open for a cool breeze. The rug rose in the air and carried me out into the garden.

Then it climbed higher and higher and soon the town was tiny beneath me. I didn’t know how to control the thing and I padded it with my paws in various places. Eventually I learned how to steer it by moving my weight from one side to the other. I used my tail as a rudder to make steering even more precise. And when I wanted to go faster, I just opened my mouth wide and mewled. I flew off and enjoyed exploring distant countries.

Where did you get the rug from? Magic carpets are far more common than people think. You assumed it was just an ordinary floor covering when you went into a shop to buy it. The threads woven into it might originally have come from India or Persia. I wondered how fast it could fly and so I decided to find out. I mewled and mewled as loud as I could and the rug accelerated until the ground beneath me became a blur. That was fun!

The wind stroked my fur and it was a pleasant sensation but it occurred to me that I might crash into a mountain if I couldn’t see where I was going. I shut my mouth and immediately started to slow down. It was night and the stars were big and bright above me and then I saw stars below me too, and I was baffled by this, because the lower stars seemed cleaner, as if they had been washed. Maybe some giant cosmic cat had licked them?

It took me a long time to understand that the lower stars were reflections in the sea and not real stars at all. I was over an ocean. I can’t say I was pleased by this, because water has always seemed a suspicious substance to me, something not to be trusted, avoided even, though I concede that it’s often necessary to life, which is why I sometimes stoop to drinking it. But all this is irrelevant. No land was in sight in any direction. I had flown halfway round the world and was now cruising above the Pacific. How risky!

My calculations were instinctive rather than mathematical, but cats have an aptitude for sensing where they are and as a navigator I’m reliable, but my exact latitude and longitude was impossible to specify. I was still travelling forward at a reduced velocity and I noticed other objects flying to my left and right, smaller than aeroplanes and soundless, and after a while it became clear they were much nearer to me than before, converging at an unseen point ahead, some destination beyond the horizon, and I was intrigued.

Soon enough, I was able to discern the details of these mysterious craft and I saw they were rugs of many different colours, magic carpets just like mine, an armada of levitating floor coverings, a flotilla if you prefer, all piloted by sundry animals: dogs, rabbits, snakes, squirrels, wombats. And the rug on my starboard side was so close that its occupant, a monkey of some kind, was able to shout at me and be understood. He yelled:

“You are the cat representative, I take it?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You must be. You are a cat sitting on a magic carpet and you are flying to the assigned rendezvous. Therefore–”

“But what is waiting at that rendezvous?”

“An urgent meeting.”

“But a meeting with whom?”

“With us!” he cried, astonished at my ignorance. “One talking animal from every species on the planet.”

“The point of this meeting is what?”

“The conferring of special powers on attendees, as promised in the oracles of ancient days. Surely you haven’t forgotten the words of the oracles? They are unambiguous about this event.”

He continued to talk, despite the shaking of my head. He said, “We talk but that’s the only way we exceed our limitations. After the meeting we will be able to do everything that humans can.”

“Already we may do more than men.”

“True, but we can also do less. It depends on the task, and they are superior when it comes to power. After the meeting, this imbalance will change. We will be better than them in every way.”

“I never received an invitation,” I protested.

“Yes, you did, or you wouldn’t be here now, on a magic carpet, heading in the right direction. Do you expect me to believe that you are here by accident, a rogue feline who flies to the island thanks to coincidence alone? Do you wish to imply that the genuine cat representative is elsewhere, perhaps having overslept in a basket, as your kind often do?”

“I can’t say,” I said.

“The oracles have given us the sacred date. The day that humans call May Day and shortly those tyrants will be calling ‘mayday’ when we dislodge them from their undeserved thrones.”

“May Day,” I repeated, still puzzled.

“Yes,” he said, pleased.

“I never know the names of days.”

“The island is not far now. Soon it will be visible. I know your ignorance is a pretence. Now let us focus on flying. We are converging from every direction and the sky will be thick with magic carpets. Accidents will happen if we aren’t very careful with our steering.”

I nodded, for I knew not what else to do.

And then I saw it.

A mountain rising out of the sea.

It was an enormous peak, shaped like a pyramid, with smooth sides and a truncated summit, so that instead of a sharp apex it had a flat space at the top, an area the size of a square dinner table. But that flat space was utterly black and I realised it wasn’t solid. It was an entrance into the hollow mountain. This was a place where animals could meet secretly in considerable safety. The only danger was the chance of midair collisions as all the magic carpets tried to dive down into that small opening. I grew nervous.

I decided to drop behind a little, to give the others a chance to enter before me and clear the airways for my own approach and descent. I still wasn’t sure I was supposed to be going to the meeting or not. Maybe I had been invited ages ago and had forgotten. It was possible. I thought that if I went I would find out for sure, and I doubted I would be deeply in trouble if it turned out I wasn’t the official delegate. I applied the air brake.

In other words, I raised my tail and increased the drag coefficient. Soon my speed was only half of the other flying carpets and they flew ahead. One by one they reached the mountain and zoomed through the narrow entrance and to my astonishment there were no accidents. The sky cleared and at last it was my turn and I felt more confident about a safe landing. The mountain was just ahead of me now and so I began a smooth descent.

But I am a cat and my essential feline nature took over. How could I settle down to rest on an island without circling it first? I was filled with an irresistible urge to fly around that island a few times before dipping into the opening on the top of the mountain. And that’s what I did. Clockwise around the island flew my rug as I gracefully steered it. I circled the mountain four and a half times and the number seemed right to me. Then I dropped into the hole and landed on a basalt platform far below in a very dim light.

I thought that the interior of the mountain would be crowded with the other animals that had preceded me, but it was empty. No creatures and no carpets. At first I supposed they had gone off into an adjacent chamber for their meeting but it soon became obvious that the chamber I was in was the only room down here. Just this immense space inside a hollow mountain and nothing else. It was the greatest mystery I had encountered in my life. The animals had vanished! What could be the reason for this? And how?

I pondered the matter for a long time, an hour or more, and then the answer occurred to me. The island was located in the Pacific and so is the International Date Line. I surmised that the line itself passed right through the middle of this peculiar mountain. I circled the island four and a half times, which means that I entered the hollow mass of rock from the opposite side to the one from which I had approached it. In other words, I had crossed the Date Lane and was one day early for the meeting. Instead of it being May Day it was the day before. What a curious situation to be in! So I waited.

I sat patiently on my rug for an entire day and when midnight passed and it was tomorrow again, I was ready to receive the other animals, who were due to arrive on May Day. But none of them showed up. Then I examined what I knew about geography and I realised my terrible mistake. I had crossed the Date Line in a westerly direction, ending up in the eastern hemisphere, which meant that I had arrived a day late rather than a day early. May Day had been and gone. The meeting was over and I had missed it.

This made me feel despondent and I scratched my rug to cause it to ascend through the hole and hover above the mountain. I now saw I wasn’t the only one to have made a mistake. The dog delegate was still circling the island, having an even stronger desire to go round and round before settling down than I did. We called out to each other and I told him the meeting was over. At first he doubted my words and thought I was just a cat trying to trick him, as cats often do, but I eventually convinced him of the facts.

With his tail between his legs, he zoomed away, howling forlornly, his ears flapping in the breeze as he accelerated. I also turned my carpet in the direction of home. I wondered if the real cat delegate had turned up or not. I asked myself if all other species of animal would now have special powers with the exception of cats and dogs. It was sobering. Dogs would definitely miss out, but cats still had a chance. It depended, as I have said, on the official cat guest. Even to this day I don’t know if he or she successfully attended the meeting. I don’t feel an increase in my powers, but who knows?

I returned home and glided in through the open window while you were in the garage tinkering with something or other. You came into the house and were delighted to see me. I had been missing for a full day and more and you thought I might have become lost or stuck up a tree. You hadn’t noticed that the rug was gone too. You aren’t very observant really. But that works to my advantage, so I don’t mind. You made a fuss of me and that was the right thing for you to do. It is my longest journey on the magic carpet to date, but I might go even further in the future. It all depends on how I feel.

“And that’s your story?” I cried.

“Yes,” said my cat.

“And you want me to write it down?”

“You can, if you like.”

“But without mentioning the fact you can talk?”

She nodded. “Indeed.”

I was exasperated and shouted, “How can I leave out that detail? The entire point of your story hinges on the fact you can talk. It is about speaking animals. If I’m not allowed to mention your vocal abilities, I might as well not bother to write the story at all. You have set me an impossible task. To omit the one thing that makes the tale worth telling!”

She shrugged. “You are the human, not I.”

“What do you mean?”

“Humans are the ones who think they are so clever and capable. They give the impression that they can achieve anything, that we are just dumb beasts and they are the supreme intellectuals.”

I was unable to find an appropriate reply.

She continued, “So if you can’t think of a way to square the circle and tell my story without telling it, that’s not my concern. But I strongly advise you not to tell any other story about a talking cat, because it’s a theme that is worn out. It should be my story or nothing.”

She curled up and purred and closed her eyes.

My desk was no longer a desk.

I laid down my pen.

Courtesy: Creative Commons

*British slang for “The Talkative Cat”

Rhys Hughes has lived in many countries. He graduated as an engineer but currently works as a tutor of mathematics. Since his first book was published in 1995 he has had fifty other books published and his work has been translated into ten languages.

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