The Magic Circle (44 page)

“You don’t mean to say that
you
know where the sacred hallows might be?” said Wolfgang. Naturally, I wanted to hear the answer too, but Dacian didn’t bite.

“As I explained to Ariel earlier,” he said patiently, “it’s the process, not the product, of the quest that’s truly important.”

“But if the hallows
aren’t
the point,” Wolfgang said in frustration, “what is?”

Dacian looked grim and shook his head. “Not
what,
” he repeated. “Not who, nor how, nor where, nor when, but
why:
that is the question. However, since facts seem so important to you, I’ll share what I do know. Indeed, I’ve already arranged to do so just after we’ve finished here.”

He put one finger beneath my chin. “The moment I learned from Wolfgang what you might be carrying with you, I reserved a spot for us, by telephone from the restaurant. Our appointment is just one minute from now, at three o’clock, only a few steps from here on the Josefsplatz. We have the place to ourselves for an hour, until four when they close, and it may well take that long. I hope our friend Wolfgang won’t be disappointed that it’s not all cut-and-dry facts; quite a lot of background goes with the story, as well as some hearsay and a few surmises of my own. I’ll tell it while the two of you dispose of those dangerous papers—”

“
Dispose
of the papers!” I choked, tightening my fingers on the bag. Wolfgang seemed shocked as well.

“My dear, be reasonable,” Dacian said. “You can’t take them into the Soviet Union. Their customs officials confiscate, on general principles, whatever cannot be identified—including parking tickets. Nor can you scatter them on the streets of Vienna, nor entrust them to Wolfgang or me, since we’re both leaving the country tomorrow too. Therefore I urge the only solution I myself can think of given such short notice—to hide them in a place where no one is likely to find them soon: among the rare books of the Austrian National Library.”

The Nationalbibliotek, built in the 1730s, is one of the most impressive libraries in the world—not because of its size or grandeur but because of its unearthly, fairylike beauty and the exotic nature of its collection of rare books, from Avicenna to Zeno, which places it second in importance only to that of the Vatican.

I’d been here rarely as a child, but I still recalled vividly the library’s whipped-cream Baroque architecture and the astonishing pastel trompe l’oeil ceiling of the lofty dome. Last but not least—the most wonderful surprise in the world to a child—the bookcases were actually
doors
, paneled in books on each side, that swung open to reveal secret book-lined chambers beyond, each containing a large table and chairs and big airy windows overlooking the courtyard, where scholars could shut themselves away and work in private for hours. It was one of these that Dacian had reserved for us.

“It’s a good plan,” Wolfgang assured me when we three were ensconced within the room. “I’d never have thought of anything better at such short notice.”

Once I’d thought it over I agreed that, risky as it might be, Dacian had come up with a plausible way to protect the manuscripts. Even if anyone learned they were hidden here, the quick tally I’d made from the placard up front told me the library’s collections of books, folios, manuscripts, maps, periodicals, and incunabula totaled around four million items. That, and the fact that the stacks were closed to public access, made retrieving the scattered pages a project of colossal proportions for anyone so minded.

For ten minutes we filled out cards for dozens of titles, handing them to librarians and waiting for the books to be pulled. When we were alone, I inserted pages of text into books pulled from shelves here in this room. As a further precaution, I proposed that once we were done we destroy all the call cards and keep no list.

“But how will we find them again?” Wolfgang objected. “To find a thousand pages by trial and error among so many books—it would take dozens of people years and years!”

“That’s what I’m counting on,” I said.

I didn’t feel it essential to mention my photographic memory again, but I could recall a list of five hundred items—such as the author/title of each book where we’d stashed a few pages—for up to about three months. If I couldn’t return in that time, I’d write out the list, recommit it to memory, and destroy it again.

More urgent was the matter of Dacian. As he said at the Schatzkammer, he had to fly back to Paris, so this session at the library was likely to be our last for quite a while, and I had plenty I needed to know before he got away. I’d have to walk and chew gum at the same time—try to split my brain to pay attention to Dacian while committing the book list to memory. I drew up my chair near his beside the window. Wolfgang stayed at the door accepting fresh shuttle-relays of books. He slid each pile down to me, maintaining a watchful eye to be sure we weren’t overheard. As I stuffed the volumes with folded pages of manuscript, I nodded for Dacian to proceed.

“I’ll try to address both your questions,” he began, “the thirteen hallows Wolfgang is interested in, and the meaning of Pandora’s papers in Ariel’s possession. The answer to both centers on a remote part of the world little visited today—and then, little understood. Once this region had the highest culture. But now its past lies buried beneath the dust of centuries. It has been battled over constantly by the great powers, and its lines of demarcation even now are in dispute. But as some have learned to their cost, this is a land so wild and mysterious that its people, like the wild panther, can never be tamed.”

He turned to regard me with those dark purple-green eyes. “I speak of a place—or so I understand—you’ll both be investigating in your journey to Russia. So our meeting today is fortunate. I am one of the few who can recount its history and, more important, the deeper meaning concealed beneath that history—for I was born there myself nearly a century ago.”

“You were born in Central Asia?” I said in surprise.

“Yes. And Sanskrit was the early language of this region, an important key. Let me give you a clearer picture of my homeland.”

Dacian withdrew from his satchel a thin piece of leather rolled up and tied with a chamois thong. He undid it and held it out to me. It seemed so fragile, I was hesitant to touch it, so Dacian spread it on the table. Wolfgang came over and stood beside us, looking down.

It was an antique map, carefully drawn and hand-tinted but without boundary lines. The map I’d just studied all that morning depicted pretty much the same terrain, so I felt topographically acquainted with the turf even without the labels: the inland seas were the Aral and the Caspian, the main watercourses the Oxus and the Indus, and the mountain ranges the Hindu Kush, the Pamirs, and the Himalayas. The only lines drawn in were dotted ones that might designate major travel routes. A few circles were drawn indicating geographical features—a few recognizable ones like Mount Everest. But it was hard to guess others without those artificial demarcations designating national boundaries we’re so accustomed to. Anticipating this, Dacian unfolded a sheet of translucent tissue marking the present boundaries and laid it over the map so the separate regions again leapt to life.

“So many people have lived here over the centuries, it blurs one’s awareness of what is important,” he explained. “These circles on the map are sites of legendary, even magical significance that transcend political changes. For instance, here.”

He indicated a spot where a podlike protrusion of Afghanistan slipped between two mountainous regions of Russian Tajikistan and Pakistan in a long, extended flow that reached out to touch westernmost China.

“It’s surely no accident,” said Dacian, “that the first of the major upheavals announcing our entry into the new aeon should occur in this particular corner of the world. From ancient times, more than any other spot on earth, it has acted as a cultural cauldron mingling east, west, north, and south—so it provides the perfect microcosm of this new age nearly upon us.”

“But if this age is to be a wave, tearing down walls and mingling cultures,” said Wolfgang, “I don’t see how it connects with this part of the world—especially Afghanistan, where Russia’s bloody but insignificant little war is unlikely to affect any culture but that one.”

“Not so insignificant. A turning point has been reached,” said Dacian. “Perhaps you think it coincidence that only this February, the Soviets withdrew from that unfortunate war ten years after invading? The withdrawal came at the precise moment when sunrise during the spring equinox, as I described before, approached one-tenth of one degree of entry into the constellation Aquarius—exactly eleven years and eleven months before the official dawning of the new aeon expected in the year 2001.”

“I agree with Wolfgang,” I told Dacian, stuffing another sheet. “It hardly seems troops marching home from a no-win war will trigger an earthshaking new two-millennium cycle. For the Russians, it seems more like back to business as usual.”

“That’s because no one has asked the key question:
Why
were the Soviets there in the first place?” said Dacian. “The answer is simple: Just as Hitler had, fifty years before, they were searching for the sacred city.”

Wolfgang and I stopped stuffing books for a moment, our eyes fixed on Dacian. He tapped at the map as if thinking, and favored us with an elusive smile.

“Magical cities have always abounded in the region,” he said. “Some were historically factual, while others were speculation or myth, such as Mongolia’s Chan-du—the Xanadu of Kublai Khan—described by Marco Polo. Or the Himalayan retreat of Shangri-La: according to legend it appears just once every millennium. Then the far western region of China, the republic of Xinjiang: In the nineteen-twenties the Russian mystic Nicholas Roerich recorded tales he collected from Kashmir to Chinese Xinjiang and Tibet of the fabulous sunken city of Shambhala, an oriental version of Atlantis. It was believed this miraculous city once was swallowed by the earth, but that it would rise again quite soon, to usher in the birth of the new aeon.”

Dacian’s eyes were closed, but as he slid his finger across the map, he seemed able to see each of these spots as he touched it. Although he had admitted he was recounting largely myths, they seemed so real to him that I was fascinated. I had to force my attention back to the papers I was supposed to be concealing.

“It is here in Nepal,” he went on, “that for thousands of years Buddhists have believed the lost city of
Agharti
is buried within Kanchenjunga—the third highest peak in the world, whose name means ‘five holy treasures of the snows.’ Then south of the world’s
second
highest mountain, K2—in the disputed zone claimed by China, India, and Pakistan—lies another secret hoard of mysterious treasure and sacred manuscripts. The legendary occultist Aleister Crowley, who was first to attempt an ascent of this mountain in 1901, was searching for these. And the most magical mountain in the region is Mount Pamir—formerly Mount Stalin, today Mount Communism—in Tajikistan. At almost twenty-five thousand feet, it’s the highest peak in the Soviet Union. The Zoroastrian Persians viewed this mountain as the chief axis of a power grid connecting sacred points of Europe and the Mediterranean with those of the Near East and Asia—a relay, it is believed by many, that can be activated only under the right circumstances, such as those that will occur at the turn of this next aeon.

“But the most interesting of all these sacred places was a city founded by Alexander the Great around 330 B.C. near today’s Russian-Afghan border. According to legend it was on this spot, thousands of years ago, that a city of great mystery and magic once stood: the last of the fabled seven cities of Solomon.”

“King Solomon?” said Wolfgang in an odd tone. “But is it possible?” He got up, quietly spoke to the librarian outside, pulled the book-laden doors shut, and came back to sit beside me.

I kept stuffing Pandora’s papers into volumes, my head down so no one could look at my face. I knew this reference to Solomon was no casual remark on Dacian’s part, any more than Sam’s many allusions: the Solomon’s knot he’d left on my car mirror, the anagrams and phone memos directing me to Song of Songs. Plenty of input, but what did it mean? I felt like a reactor at critical mass. I sat there trying to shove my control rods back in and focus on the connections. I slid my pile of books to Wolfgang, who handed me another.

“It’s a part of the world few would associate with Solomon,” Dacian conceded. “Yet an entire range between the Indus Valley and Afghanistan, just south of where the hidden city is thought to be, is named for him: the Suleimans. There, in a hollow crater on top, his throne—the
takht-i-Suliman
—was regarded by the ancients as another axis connecting heaven to earth.

“With Solomon, myth is often mingled with fact: it’s said he was a magus with dominion over water, earth, wind, and fire; that he understood the language of animals, employing the services of ants and bees to build the Jerusalem temple; that doves and feys designed his magical city of the sun in Central Asia, a place long sought by Alexander the Great through many lands. When Solomon took Balqis, Queen of Sheba, on a tour of the many cities he’d created, aboard a magic carpet on which he placed a royal throne, and the queen looked back toward her homeland, Solomon’s genie scooped the hollow from the mountaintop and set down the throne so she had a better view. A real
takht-i-Suliman
was recorded in the expedition survey of the region in 1883. There was also a Persian fire temple from the time of Alexander built on the very spot. The link with fire worship is of importance to our story. Alexander and Solomon, each with one foot dipped in history and one in legend, are linked in other ways, too—in the lore of Hindus, Buddhists, Tantric Tibetans, Nestorian Christians—even the holy book of Islam, the Qur’ān.”