following an almost imperceptible climb southward through gently undulating foothills. The road began to twist and turn now, pulling ever nearer the distant snow-covered range, while beside us the River Terek surged in a torrent. The air had a late summer tang to it of honeysuckle, dry pine, and hay.
As he published his findings in various scientific and engineering journals, Fessenden posted his friend the articles to read. In a letter dated 1893, Lampman thanks him for sending a recent article in Scientific American. He found it surprisingly clear. He didn’t know if he would ever completely grasp Fessenden’s theory concerning the transportation of sound over great distances through thin air. The poet thought himself too much a creature of his senses, confessing that what he could not see or touch he found difficult to conceive. Nature herself was supernatural enough for him. It seemed a contradictory statement, I thought, given his belief in faeries and the like.
On Fessenden’s recommendation, he read Ancient Fragments by Professor Cory at Princeton, and another book by a man named Mead. Since their days at Trinity, they had become fascinated by a single problem, which was to locate the Pillars of Hercules marking the entrance to the waterway leading to Colchis and Eden. The textual evidence seemed to indicate that the sons of Seth had settled in Egypt or thereabouts, and at first Fessenden was convinced that the Pillars, if they still existed, would be found there. Lampman, on the other hand, doubted that Egypt was the place to search. If I have it right, he reasoned that the flooding of the Nile River, being an annual event, brought with it the fertilising silt that is such a boon to agriculture there. Josephus, he argued, described the descendants of Seth as being naturally of a good disposition, happy, remaining true to their faith, and free from evil. Like the Babylonians, they made careful studies of the heavens, and lest the knowledge of their science be lost, they recorded their discoveries on two columns or stelae, one of brick and the other of stone.
Lampman maintained they were happy because they were far enough away from the place where the Deluge had occurred, and that the stelae they erected in Egypt must have been copies of ones lost to them after the Flood. If Josephus had meant that the original Pillars of Hercules were in Egypt, wouldn’t he have said so? The poet believed that the survivors of the Flood and their descendants took with them, along with the habit of building recording columns, an abiding fear that the catastrophe would be repeated. He wrote that his “friend” at work, Miss Waddell—he had mentioned her to Fessenden in previous letters—believed that the stelae were symbols of the sexual potency that was probably universally lost for a period of time due to the psychological trauma associated with the overwhelmingly destructive force of the water. A most provocative woman.
But returning to the question, what then had the two amateur archaeologists proposed? A happy but cautious people enjoying prosperity and an expanding scientific knowledge in a new land, yet wary enough of a repetition of a cataclysmic event, something awful from the deepest recesses of memory, that they made a concerted effort to record their knowledge upon indestructible columns, one of brick which, should it be washed away, had a twin made of stone. Fair enough, but where were these monuments now? Lampman pondered. Were they under the sands of the Sahara or somewhere much farther away? Fessenden thought his friend’s intuitive approach laughably unscientific, but something vague still told the poet they were looking in the wrong part of the world for the Pillars of Khur-Khal.
Out of a sense of hospitality, being the assumed host given the circumstances of our meeting, I tried to put my companions at their ease by recounting the details of a recent trip I had taken to the Punjabi region of India. Sergei, who had joined me at the Bosporus, made no pretence of hiding his boredom and promptly fell asleep. Miss Waddell appeared to warm to me or to the situation in general, and encouraged me with the occasional nod or exclamation of wonder. When I related a story of a young wife who chose to immolate herself on the funeral bier of her husband, her eyes grew wide.
“How horrible!” she cried, almost the first words she had volunteered since we had set out together, but from her tone she was anything but horrified. She shifted her weight forward, causing the fur wrap covering her upper body to slip—the air was decidedly icier now as the height of our ascent became evident—and she revealed two things immediately. The first was that she was the type of person who is fascinated by death. I can pick out such a one from a group of twenty people in a trice: he or she gazes for great lengths of time into the distance at no single point on the actual horizon, not the perfect silhouette of Mount Kasbek, say, which we were approaching, nor the sheep-dotted foothills, but longingly toward a point of inner ceasing. It is the look of one made ill by love. The second revelation was that she was holding to her bosom a square wooden box roughly the size of Fessenden’s large hand, and that this item she considered as dear to her as her life. A sense of decorum prevented me from asking her directly what the box contained or why it was she guarded it so closely, and so I directed my attention instead to the professor, asking him whether he had some specific business or research that brought him so far from America.
“Where to begin. Do you know your Bible, Mr. Norman?”
I confessed to knowing only enough to get through the Anglican service without any of my constituents thinking the less of me for it.
“My father was an Anglican minister. By the time I was seven, he made sure I knew my Bible lessons better than I knew my flora and fauna. ’In the beginning was the Word.’ Now I have always considered the word of God to be truth. It has to be, or where do we find ourselves? Putting the word of God on par with the word of man would make the former a variable, unreliable communication. Wouldn’t you agree?”
A natural sense of diplomacy led me to nod a vigorous assent. I am not a thrice-returned Member of Parliament by mere chance. The way Miss Waddell was now contemplating her lap and sighing, however, assured me that she held a contrary opinion, and suggested that this was a discussion—an argument?—that they had had before.
“I must warn you, Mr. Norman, that the good professor likes to set intellectual traps.You have successfully avoided his first one. Similar pitfalls remain, however. For example, you are familiar, of course, with Mr. Darwin’s theories contained in his Origin of Species?”
I was, and told her so, although I declined to admit that all I knew about Mr. Darwin’s theories of evolution of life on Earth came from the synopsis my parliamentary secretary had prepared for me. Your humble representative, Dear Reader, is expected to assimilate more written matter in one session than the average person could possibly read in a lifetime.
“Then using logic and the evidence collected by your five senses—you do have all of your five senses intact, do you not, Mr. Norman?”
I assured her that I did, ceding to her sudden playfulness by asking her to call me Henry. How could someone be so distant one moment, so coy and provocative the next?
“Common sense alone would lead you to the singular conclusion that Earth and all life we see upon it today could not have been created in six days.”
“Again you misunderstand what I mean by Truth,” Fessenden said, no small edge of annoyance in his voice. “The ancients did not make up stories except about that which they could not have experienced. Clearly the creation of the world and the universe was something they had missed seeing by a few billion years. Their belief was in an omnipotent creator. Even today, in this new century, who of us can look about in wonder at the complexity of life and not believe in God? Dress the Deity how you will, we return always to this question of origin. I believe that we must honour the beliefs of our predecessors, and that to fail to do so is to lose touch with our origin, wherein lies our very humanity. To the ancients, a creator who could make so miraculous a planet as this must have been a being that could do it in the blink of an eye, let alone in the span of a week. I repeat my earlier assertion: the ancients held storytelling—and by that I mean fictionalizing—in low regard. Why would one make something up? Was that not lying? Look at the suspicion with which Plato regarded the artist in Greek society. Seeing the first performance of a play, his esteemed relative, Solon, collared