And on the Eighth Day (9 page)

Was not the whole city a gaudy sink? Was not the whole country?

A farmer or rancher might feel safe from the distant corruption; he soon felt the pain of nearer ills. He found himself slave to the railroad, whose unchecked tolls robbed him of most of his profit; the plaything of speculators, who juggled the prices his produce sold for.

While in the nation’s capital a man of war—said to be a drunkard—sat in the highest office of the land! Political places were bought and sold by his lieutenants without scruple. Huge corporate combines, with the connivance of his administration, scandalously plundered the people’s resources.

It was a black time for the God-fearing. Where to turn? Where to go?

The self-contained world of the Latter-Day Saints seemed to offer a way and a destination; but it was open only to those who professed the Mormon faith. And this, for the Teacher’s people, was impossible.

Ellery leaned forward eagerly. “Why, Teacher?”

“Because of our own faith,” replied the old man.

“Yes, of course. But what is it? Where did it come from?”

The Teacher shook his Biblical head. The roots of Quenan’s faith, he said, went so deep into the past that not the oldest member of the holy community—even in the Teacher’s childhood—could say whence it grew. It could be traced through many generations and countries, but the trail became fainter and more difficult to follow, until at last it vanished altogether in the wilderness of time. Communicants had fallen by the wayside, but always a small hard core of the faithful remained to keep the faith alive.

Ellery’s persistent questions turned up little. The Bible apparently played no direct role in the beliefs of the Teacher’s people, although it colored their traditions and theology. The sect (if that was what it was) had once had a way of life, it appeared, that had been “lost” in the long march of the centuries; the tradition of this vanished way of life had been handed down from Teacher to Teacher, the old man said, and he made a vague reference to the pages of Pliny and Josephus (there it was again, Ellery thought suddenly—a confirmation of his own fugitive recollection).

In sum, the Teacher continued, the Crownsil of his youth in a series of solemn meetings made a decision: They must leave the abominable world in which they found themselves. Somewhere in the vast lands to the east, even if in desert wastes, their people would seek a place in which they might live, uncontaminated, as a self-contained community, in strict accordance with their own ethical and socio-economic principles.

And so the people sold their houses and lands and businesses; wagons and supplies were purchased; and one day a great caravan left San Francisco and began the eastward trek. And this was another long, hard time.

Their first attempt at settlement, on a verdant tract of land not far from Carson City, was disastrous. They had chosen the site because there was then no railroad to the Nevada capital and, compared with San Francisco, Carson City was a mere village. But its very smallness proved their undoing. Saloons and gambling hells and dance halls, because of the lesser scale of Carson City, proved too tempting to many who had been frightened off by the massive bawdiness of the great city on the Bay. And the strange ways of the colony brought them unwelcome visitors, who came to stare and jeer, men of foul mouths accompanying birdlike flocks of gaudy-plum-aged, shrieking women.

Within a year the Crownsil decreed the Carson City colony a failure; they must move on. Most of their worldly assets were tied up in the land purchase and must be written off; very well, they would go where money was not merely unnecessary, but useless. They would find a place so remote, so off the beaten track, that the world would forget them—would not even know of them.

Through many nights and days thereafter, the caravan toiled southeast. People died and were buried by the wayside. Young men and women were married. Children were born.

Generally, the migration tried to avoid settlements. It happened once, however, that a man died after having been taken to a doctor in a frontier village. He had no family, and no one could be spared to drive his wagon, nor was there any room for his goods and gear in any of the other wagons. So everything was sold in the village for fifty silver dollars, and the wagon train moved on—not, however, before attempts were made to seduce several of the girls, to rob the Teacher’s father of the fifty silver dollars and the rest of the wagon train’s dwindling cash, to entice one couple into claiming the teams and wagons of the entire colony with promise to support the dishonest claim by perjured evidence and a venal judge and jury. All these attempts failed. The latter-day pilgrims left town with dogs turned on them, stones thrown, and guns fired to stampede their beasts.

It was their last contact with civilization.

Food was running low and water had run out when the tugging of their oxen, smelling the springs, brought the pioneers to the ringed hill which they were to call Crucible. Here was a veritable oasis in the desert, hidden, green, rich in water and arable soil, with space enough to grow food for all their number. And they called the valley Quenan.

(Ellery, thinking about this later, decided that “Quenan” might be a corruption of “Canaan,” altered by the local accent and grown pronouncedly different in isolation. Though they might not possess a single copy of the Bible, the noble language of the King James Version was familiar to all nineteenth-century Americans: what more natural than that, consciously or otherwise, they should have identified their wanderings in the wilderness with those of the Children of Israel? So he was to think, but he was never to be sure.)

In the Valley they settled, building their first rude shelters from the wood and canvas of the wagons; and here they had remained ever since.

The exodus from San Francisco must have taken place in 1872 or 1873; from Carson City in 1873 or 1874.

“And in all these years,” Ellery asked incredulously, “no stranger has ever found his way here?”

The Teacher reflected. “I believe I said earlier that that was so. But I had forgotten—there was one. It came to pass some forty years ago, during one of the Potter’s journeys with his assistants into the desert to obtain the special clay of which our prayer-scroll jars are made. A man was found lying in the sands; it was far north of Quenan. The man barely breathed. We hold life sacred; and in spite of our laws the Potter brought him here and he was nursed back to health. As it turned out, no harm was done, for his ordeal in the desert had erased from his mind all memory of the past, even his name. So we instructed him in our faith and our laws, and he lived in Quenan as one of us for the rest of his days. I had lost the habit of thinking of him as from the outside. He ceased some years ago.”

One intruder in seventy years, and that one a blank page! Did the community know anything of the world outside? Very little, apparently. Once in a great while the Teacher or the Storesman saw, at or near Otto Schmidt’s store, a wagon which needed no beasts to pull it, like Elroï’s own; and, of course, for some years the people had caught occasional glimpses of flying machines that made a noise like distant thunder in the sky; but as to events … The old man shook his head. Even he, the Teacher, the oldest and most learned man in the Valley, knew nothing of the outside; nor did he wish to know.

“Do you remember the Civil War?” Ellery asked.

The sun-black forehead creased. “That would have to do with”—he paused, as if the next Word were unfamiliar—“soldiers? Who wore clothes of blue? I was a young child … There is in my mind a confused recollection of many marching men in blue … many people shouting … my father’s voice saying that these were soldiers coming back from the Rebellion …”

Of World War I the old man knew nothing. And it was clear that he was equally ignorant of the second global war in a generation, the one currently being waged. Had not Otto Schmidt mentioned it? But the old man shook his head. “I do not speak to him of worldly things; he thinks we are wild men, hermits, and knows nothing of our community. We revere truth, but Quenan must remain hidden from men’s minds.”

The Teacher showed no curiosity whatever about the war, and he seemed quite unconscious of the many United States laws he and his people were daily breaking, not to mention the laws of the state.

Such was the story as Ellery pieced it together from the Teacher’s account and, later, from the scant records he was able to consult in the archives of the Chronicler …

It was while he pored over the Chronicler’s records (his search for some reference in them to Josephus or Pliny was in vain, and the Chronicler had not even a dozing acquaintance with the names) that Ellery suddenly remembered. Both Josephus and Pliny the Elder had written of a religious order originating in the second century
B.C.
called the Essenes—yes, and now that he thought about it, so had the first century
A.D.
Jewish philosopher of Alexandria, Philo, who had also left an account of a non-Christian ascetic sect in the Egypt of his time whom he called the Therapeutae.

The Essenes had practiced strict communal possession; scrupulous cleanliness—the frequent ceremonial washings of the Quenanites? The Essenes had abhorred lying, covetousness, cheating; they subsisted by pastoral and agricultural activities and handicrafts.

Was it possible that the sect of Quenan had descended from the ancient Essenes? But there were important differences: the Essenes had abstained from conjugal relations; they had condemned slavery.

Ellery wondered. Practices, even beliefs, might well have been lost or modified in the course of over two thousand years by a people with poor written records and the pressures of dispersion in a swiftly proliferating world of Christians and Moslems … It was possible. But no one would ever know.

“Quenan must remain hidden from men’s minds …” That is, the secret valley was a world unto itself, secure in its purity from outside contamination.

But now its purity was threatened by contamination from within.

Someone of the community had, by stealth and contrivance, made a duplicate of the Teacher’s key to the sanquetum. Why? The reason must be an overpowering one. For the act was not only Quenan’s first crime in almost two generations, but, unlike Belyar’s theft of the cloth fifty years before, it was also an act of sacrilege.

Mere curiosity about the sanquetum—a perverse impulse to see the interior of the forbidden room simply because it was forbidden? Possible, but unlikely; in the face of a powerful taboo, curiosity alone would hardly induce a Quenanite to go fishing in the dead of night through one of the slit-windows in the room of the revered Teacher for the sanquetum key, to take a beeswax impression of it, to return the key, and then to manufacture a duplicate from the mold.

No, the act must have a more tangible base than that.

Theft? But of what? The jars of prayer scrolls? But every family had its own prayer scrolls. The holy book of—what had the Teacher called it?—Mk’h, “the book which was lost” but which, presumably, had been found again? This might be the reason if the community were torn by religious dissension—schism, heresy; but it was not.

That seemed to leave only the “treasure” of the silver coins—the fifty dollars realized by the Teacher’s father from the sale of the goods of the man who had died on the trail after the community’s exodus from Carson City, and which had apparently been hoarded as a sort of special fund, cash expenditures having been made out of the community’s original paper money for as long as it lasted.

But what could anyone in Quenan want with fifty silver dollars, or even one silver dollar? Some bauble at Otto Schmidt’s store? The forbidden pleasure of mere possession of the shiny coins?

Ellery shook his head. It was a puzzle—a deep puzzle.

The Teacher rose, staff in hand. His ancient face was torn with grief. “I fear, Elroï, that this matter of the key may indeed be the beginning of the calamities which have been foretold. But now I must go to the children; they are awaiting me in the school. I go with a troubled heart.”

“It may be, Teacher,” Ellery said, rising also, “that you make too much of this.” But his tone conveyed his own misgivings.

“It will be as it will be,” the old man said. “You will find the Waterman on the south slope, waiting to show you the aqueduct and the irrigation canals.”

And Ellery heard himself saying, “The Wor’d sustain you, Teacher.”

The old eyes, which had as usual been staring through Ellery, narrowed and focused on him.

“Blessed be the Wor’d,” said the Teacher.

April 5

E
LLERY DECIDED RATHER EARLY
the next morning that the Superintendent would have made the perfect minor civil servant anywhere in the overcivilized world. He had been designated by the Teacher to conduct the Guest to the northernmost part of the Valley and to point out to him those features of the Valley which they would encounter en route.

“I will conduct you to the northernmost part of the Valley,” the Superintendent said to Ellery’s Adam’s apple in a sort of liturgical mumble.

“So the Teacher told me,” Ellery said.

“And I will point out to you those features of the Valley which we shall encounter—”

“So the Teacher—”

“—en route,” the Superintendent concluded. He was a shiny sort of man who looked as ageless as a robot. He might have been a postal inspector in Iowa or an assistant curator of a provincial Yugoslavian museum or a sealer of scales in a small municipality in Australia. Did the nature of the work produce this type, or did the type seek out the work? Ellery decided to be philosophical and make the best of it. He was stuck with the man for the whole morning.

“Let’s go, then,” Ellery said, stopping a sigh.

“Shall we go?” the Superintendent asked promptly. And after a few silent moments of walking he said, “That is the communal dining hall.”

“I know, Superintendent. I ate there this morning. And yesterday. And the day before.”

The man looked at him glassily. “It is where the community eats,” he said.