Ghosts by Gaslight (24 page)

R
OBERT
S
ILVERBERG
Smithers and the Ghosts of the Thar

W
HAT HAPPENED TO
Smithers out there in the Great Indian Desert may seem a trifle hard to believe, but much that happens in Her Imperial Majesty’s subcontinent is a trifle hard to believe, and yet one disbelieves it at one’s peril. Unfortunately, there is nobody to tell the tale but me, for it all happened many years ago, and Yule has retired from the Service and is living, so I hear, in Palermo, hard at work on his translation of Marco Polo, and Brewster, the only witness to the tragic events in the desert, is too far gone in senility now to be of any use to anyone, and Smithers—ah, poor Smithers—

But let me begin. We start in Calcutta and the year is 1858, with the memory of the dread and terrible Mutiny still overhanging our dreams, distant though those bloody events were from our administrative capital here. That great engineer and brilliant scholar Henry Yule—Lieutenant-Colonel Yule, as he was then, later to be Sir Henry—having lately returned from Allahabad, where he was in charge of strengthening and augmenting our defenses against the rebels, has now been made Secretary of the Public Works Department, with particular responsibility for designing what one day will be the vast railroad system that will link every part of India. I hold the title of Deputy Consulting Engineer for Railways. Our young friend Brewster is my right-hand man, a splendid draughtsman and planner. And as my story opens Brewster has come to us, looking oddly flushed, with the news that Smithers, our intense, romantic, excitable Smithers, whom we have sent off on a surveying mission to Jodhpur and Bikaner and other sites in the remote West, has returned and is on his way to us at this very moment with an extraordinary tale to tell.

“Is he now?” Yule said, without much sign of animation. Yule is a Scot, stern and outwardly dour and somewhat fierce-looking, though I am in a position to know that behind that grim bearded visage lies a lively mind keenly alert to the romance of exploration. “Did he find a railroad already in place out there, I wonder? Some little project of an enterprising Rajput prince?”

“Here he comes now,” said Brewster. “You will hear it all from the man himself.” And an instant later Smithers was among us.

Smithers was fair-haired and very pink-skinned, with gleaming blue eyes that blazed out from his face like sapphires. Though he was somewhat below middle height, he was deep-chested and wide-shouldered, and so forceful was his physical presence that he could and did easily dominate a room of much taller men. Certainly he dominated his friend Brewster, who had known him since childhood. They had been to university together and they had entered the service of the East India Company together, taking appointment with the Bengal Engineers and making themselves useful in the Public Works Department, specializing in the building of bridges and canals. I could best describe the lanky, dark-complected Brewster as timid and cautious, one who was designed by Nature as a follower of stronger men, and Smithers, who in his heart of hearts looked upon himself as part of a grand English tradition of adventurous exploration that went back through Burton and Rawlinson and Layard to Walter Raleigh and Francis Drake, was the man to whom he had attached himself.

“Well, Smithers?” Yule asked. “What news from Bikaner?”

“Not from Bikaner, sir,” said Smithers, “but from the desert beyond. The Thar, sir! The Thar!” His blazing blue eyes were wilder than ever and his face was rough and reddened from his weeks in the sun.

Yule looked startled. “You went into the Thar?” A reconnaissance of the vast bleak desert that lies beyond the cities of Rajputana had not been part of Smithers’s immediate task.

“Only a short way, sir. But what I learned—what I have heard—!”

Yule, who can be impatient and irritable, made a swift circular beckoning gesture, as though to say, “Aye, out with it, man!” But Smithers needed no encouragement. Already a story was tumbling from him: how in the desert city of Bikaner he had fallen in with an itinerant Portuguese merchant newly returned from a venture into the Great Indian Desert—the Thar, as the natives call it, that immense waterless void 150 miles in breadth that stretches northeastward for some 400 miles from the swampy Rann of Cutch. Breathlessly Smithers retold the tale the Portuguese had told him: an unknown valley far out in the Thar, the sound of strange voices floating on the air, sometimes calling alluringly, sometimes wailing or sobbing, voices that could only be the voices of spirits or demons, for there was no one to be seen for miles around; the eerie music of invisible musicians, gongs and drums and bells, echoing against the sands; and above all a distinct sensation as of
summoning,
the awareness of some powerful force pulling one onward, deeper into that valley. The Portuguese had resisted that force, said Smithers, for he was a hard-nosed trader and was able to keep his mind on business; but from villagers at an oasis town the man had picked up fragmentary anecdotes of an entire ancient city hidden away in that valley, a lost civilization, a land of ghosts, in fact, from which that potent summons came, and into whose mysterious realm many a traveler had vanished, never to return.

I saw what I took to be the unmistakable glint of skepticism in Yule’s eyes. He has never been a man to suffer foolishness gladly; and from the knotting of his bristling brows I interpreted his response to Smithers’s wild fable as annoyance. But I was wrong.

“Singing spirits, eh?” Yule said. “Gongs and drums and bells? Let me read you something, and see if it sounds familiar.”

He drew from his desk a sheaf of manuscript pages that were, we already knew, his translation of
The Book of Ser Marco Polo
—the earliest draft of it, rather, for Yule was destined to spend two decades on this magnum opus before giving the world the first edition in 1870, nor did he stop revising and expanding it even then. But even here in 1858 he had done a substantial amount of the work.

“Marco is in the Gobi,” said Yule, “in the vicinity of the desert town of Lop, and he writes, ‘The length of this desert is so great that ’tis said it would take a year and more to ride from one end of it to the other. Beasts there are none, for there is naught for them to eat. But there is a marvelous thing related of this desert, which is that when travelers are on the move by night, and one of them chances to lag behind or to fall asleep or the like, when he tries to gain his company again he will hear spirits talking, and will suppose them to be his comrades. Sometimes the spirits will call him by name; and thus shall a traveler ofttimes be led astray so that he never finds his party. And in this way many have perished.’ ”

“It is much like what the Portuguese told me,” said Smithers.

Yule nodded. “I will go on. ‘Sometimes the stray travelers will hear as it were the tramp and hum of a great cavalcade of people away from the real line of road, and taking this to be their own company they will follow the sound; and when day breaks they find that a cheat has been put upon them and that they are in an ill plight. Even in the daytime one hears those spirits talking. And sometimes you shall hear the sound of a variety of musical instruments, and still more commonly the sound of drums.’ ”

Smithers said, and his face grew even redder, “How I long to hear those drums!”

“Of course you do,” said Yule, and brought out the whisky and soda, and passed around the cigars, and I knew that look in Yule’s formidable glittering eyes had not been one of skepticism at all, but of complete and utter captivation.

He went on to tell us that such tales as Marco Polo’s were common in medieval travel literature, and, rummaging among his papers, he read us a citation from Pliny of phantoms that appear and vanish in the deserts of Africa, and one from a Chinese named Hiuen Tsang six centuries before Marco that spoke of troops with waving banners marching in the Gobi, vanishing and reappearing and vanishing again, and many another tale of goblins and ghouls and ghostly dancers and musicians in the parched places of the world. “Of course,” said Yule, “it is possible to explain some of this music and song merely as the noises made by shifting sands affected by desert winds and extreme heat, and the banners and armies as illusions that the minds of men traveling under such stressful conditions are likely to generate.” He stared for a moment into his glass; he took a reflective puff of his cigar. “And then, of course, there is always the possibility that these tales have a rational origin—that somewhere in one of these deserts there does indeed lurk a hidden land that would seem wondrously strange to us, if only we could find it. The great age of discovery, gentlemen, is not yet over.”

“I request leave, sir, to look into the Thar beyond Bikaner and see what might be found there,” Smithers said.

It was a daring request. Smithers was our best surveyor, and the entire subcontinent needed measuring for the system of railways that we intended to create in its immense expanse, and nobody was planning to run track through the desert beyond Bikaner, for there was nothing there. Plenty of urgent work awaited Smithers between Delhi and Jodhpur, between Calcutta and Bombay, and elsewhere.

But Yule rose with that glitter of excitement in his eyes again and began pulling maps from a portfolio under his desk and spreading them out, the big thirty-two-miles-to-the-inch map and a smaller one of the Frontier, pointing to this place and that one in the Thar and asking if one of them might have been the one of which that Portuguese had spoken, and we knew that Smithers’s request had been granted.

W
HAT I DID
not expect was that Brewster would be allowed to accompany him. Plainly it was a dangerous expedition and Smithers ought not to have been permitted to undertake it alone, but I would have thought that a subaltern or two and half a dozen native trackers would be the appropriate complement. Indeed, Brewster was a strong and healthy young man who would readily be able to handle the rigors of the Thar, but an abundance of work awaited him right here in Calcutta, and it struck me as remarkably extravagant for Yule to be willing to risk not one but two of our best engineers on such a fantastic endeavor at this critical time in the development of the nascent Indian railway system.

But I had failed to reckon with two traits of Yule’s character. One was his insatiable scholarly curiosity, which had drawn him to the close study not only of Marco Polo’s huge book but of the texts of many another early traveler whose names meant nothing to me: Ibn Batuta, for example, and Friar Jordanus, and Oderic of Pordenone. We were living at a time when the remaining unknown places of the world were opening before us, and the discovery—or rediscovery—of strange and marvelous regions of Asia held great fascination for him. Though he himself could not leave his high responsibilities in Calcutta, Smithers would serve as his surrogate in the far-off Thar.

Then, too, I had overlooked Yule’s profound complexity of spirit. As I have already noted, he is not at all the grim, stolid, monolithic administrator that he appears to a casual observer to be. I have spoken of his irritability and impatience; I should mention also his bursts of temper, followed by spells of black depression and almost absolute silence, and also the—well,
eccentricity
that has led him, a man who happens to be color-blind, to dress in the most outlandish garb and think it utterly normal. (I have in mind his brilliant claret-colored trousers, which he always insisted were silver-gray.) He is complicated; he is very much his own man. So if he had taken it into his mind to send our highly valued Smithers off to look for lost cities in the Thar, nothing would stop him.

And when he asked Smithers what sort of complement he thought he would need, Smithers replied, “Why, Brewster and I can probably deal with everything all by ourselves, sir. We don’t want a great silly crowd of bearers and trackers, you know, to distract us as we try to cope with those musical specters in the desert.”

Quickly I looked at Brewster and saw that he was as amazed as I was to find himself requisitioned for the expedition. But he made a quick recovery and managed a grin of boyish eagerness, as if he could think of nothing more jolly than to go trekking off into a pathless haunted desert with his hero Smithers. And Yule showed no reaction at all to Smithers’s request: once again he demonstrated his approval simply through silence.

Of course, getting to the Thar would be no easy matter. It lies at the opposite side of the subcontinent from Calcutta, far off in the northwest, beyond Lucknow, beyond Agra, beyond Delhi. And, as I have said, all of this was taking place at a time before we had built the Indian railway system. Smithers had just made the round trip from Calcutta to Bikaner and back, fifteen hundred miles or more, by an arduous journey down the Grand Trunk Road, India’s backbone before the railways existed. I have no idea how he traveled—by horse, by camel, by bullock-cart, by affiliating himself with merchant caravans, by any such means he could. And now he—and Brewster—would have to do it all over again. The journey would take months.

I should mention that Smithers had been engaged for the past year and a half to the Adjutant’s daughter, Helena, a young woman as notable for her beauty as for her sweetness of temperament, and the wedding was due to take place in just another dozen weeks or so. I wondered how Smithers would be able to prevail on her for a postponement; but prevail he did, either through his own force of personality or the innately accommodating nature that is so typical of women, and the wedding was postponed. We held a grand farewell party for Smithers and Brewster at Fort William, where nothing was asked and nothing was volunteered about the reason for their departure, and in the small hours of the night we stood by the bank of the river with brandy glasses in hand, singing the grand old songs of our native country so far away, and then in the morning they set out to find whatever it was that they were destined to find in the Great Indian Desert.