Paradise and Elsewhere (4 page)

This desert is an inhospitable place for any man and if by any chance, mishap should befall me in the course of my return to the capital I wish to entrust you, my esteemed friend, with the discovery of this inestimable treasure. I beg of you in the name of our long association and our common love of science to publish my findings as well as you can, and then make your way with all haste here to continue my work. I have no doubt but that items of immense value and beauty are to be found beneath the tombs.

Your affectionate friend, Carbourne.

 

N
ot forty years ago
, when the man standing before us today with a small ironic smile playing about his lips was still in the deep shade of his mother's womb—before we passed the millennium, before the shady dome was built—another guide, a short, fattish man not half so elegant, though just as perfectly spoken as ours, would have been much preoccupied with the story of Sidney Carbourne.

“It was only after Dr. Fellows' death,” he says, “that this letter was found, plunging his family into disgrace. His daughter was so ashamed that she committed suicide. He had even passed off the drawings, which Carbourne had neglected to sign, as his own!”

There is more than a suspicion of military background about this other guide, and an angry passion about the eyes. His party, larger than ours, obeys his every instruction with alacrity: eyes right, eyes left, marching forth on the sand hot as coals. Yet they are freer than us in their dress: the women, hatless, in low-cut tops and calf-length dresses or baggy shorts, the men with blazers off, short-sleeved shirts undone at the neck and stained beneath the arms. Their skins are deeply tanned, even red and flaking here and there, but they do not care. They want to soak it all up, history and sunshine alike.

“I'm afraid the early history of archaeology is full of such unscrupulousness. These were colonial times. Foreigners came with their heads full of nonsense and everyone believed them.” He laughs bitterly. Some of the party smile, but uncertainly—they are foreigners too and feel his contempt. “Nowadays we are much more scrupulous. Carbourne's theory, though correct in some respects, is largely a fairy tale fuelled by his consuming jealousy of a friend of his who had made his reputation and fortune by means of a discovery in Egypt. It was a minor one compared to what was to come, but considered important at the time. Sidney Carbourne dreamed of addressing the Royal Society back in England, but he never did. Some say that he wasn't even the first to discover Sidda: the remains of a single human skeleton of recent origin were found buried in a shallow grave.

“Carbourne's Pyramid is clearly a ridiculous hypothesis, easily disproved by a few calculations—” Forceful and intense, this other guide jabs contemptuously at the glass case containing Sidney's last written words, and a piece of pink stone he collected and marked with Indian ink. “In seeing Sidda merely as a precursor of Egyptian civilization he severely underestimated it. Nowadays,” he stands a little straighter, “we value it as the first emergence of that ingenuity and fortitude we like to think of as an essential feature of our national character. Follow me!

“You have to imagine these surrounding lands, as Carbourne suggested, far greener than they are today. There was water in relative abundance, for beneath this sand is a thick band of rock and beneath that there were at the time underground streams. Here and there, a fault in the bed of rock allowed water to seep upwards, creating fertile patches of land. This area was particularly rich in such secret wells, and the Siddanese took a vital first step when they decided to dig down and search beneath the sand for the source of the damp. They found that as they went down the dampness increased, and that with much labour they could in the end tap the source of water itself. This was sufficient to turn them from a nomadic to a settled people. With the stones they had brought up from beneath the sand they began to build, and with the water they irrigated the land round about. By the second century of its existence Sidda had fifteen functioning wells. They can still be distinguished: the larger ones, clustered together to your left. Imagine how Sidda must have appeared to the traveller: a shimmering oasis of green on the horizon, scarcely believable in its beauty. As the land began to yield a surplus and trade developed, a class system began to emerge, with an upper tier of landowners and a lower of manual workers, employed year in year out with the cutting and carrying of stone and the transport of water. Above both of these were the four well guardians or priests, who ensured that life was lived so as to please the gods responsible for their city's good fortune. These four hexagonal towers were the priest houses. Follow me inside the courtyard!

“Imagine this sculpture in its full glory: beneath it was a powerful natural spring, forcing water upwards like a fountain. See how it's built from many stones, leaving cracks and fissures between which the water gushed out, then flowed down into the sand. If you will excuse the gesture—see how a little saliva brings out the rich green of the rock, so like the green of healthy leaves. This we think was the centre of the water ceremonies, in which celebrants approached from the four corners of the square along these paths, watched by the priests in their towers… ”

Nowadays, this guide's story would not excite us. We'd know what was to come, and we'd turn away: “Then disaster struck!” Who wants to hear of such things? Who wants to see Mr. Melanoma's face? But back then it was different; they felt quite safe, and liked to hear of catastrophe.

“One by one the fifteen wells ran dry. Twenty-four new ones were dug in an increasingly desperate search for water, making the number up to thirty-nine. If you look at the path you're standing beside, you will see many fragments of pottery. Pick one up—you hold in your hand a pattern of lines and dots in which we can read the story of the end of Sidda. The marks are arranged in units ranging from fifteen to seventy-eight, which is twice thirty-nine. Each dot is a well still functioning, each line is a dry one. Thus we have a record of the fluctuating fortunes of the city, and indeed the main work of the Institute is now to arrange them chronologically so as to piece together a history of each well. Each fragment is part of a water bowl, and these, we think, were brought before the statue of the water god, filled, and then smashed on the way back out of the square as a gesture of homage and propitiation. Please put the pieces back.

“Gather around. I can show you here an exact replica from the last days—look: all lines. Empty, empty, empty. No water. Sidda was destroyed by the very forces of nature that had brought it into being in the first place, and its inhabitants were forced to take up again the harsh nomadic life of times before. Yet, naturally, we hope that one day the desert will flower again, and even now plans are afoot to bring a team of international scientists into the desert a little north of here in the hope of discovering underground waters. Then we could grow barley and tomatoes, avocado, watermelon, even strawberries, and you visitors would not see so many starving children begging in the street.

“Ladies and gentlemen, you will leave in ten minutes. Please ask me questions if you wish, or take a cold drink in the caf
é
by the car-park. Nowadays, I'm afraid the water is in bottles and comes many miles by road! Thank you.” He salutes them at the end, looking over the tops of their heads at his imaginary oasis, of which there is now no trace.

“Where did you learn your English?” a woman with white skin baked brown but for the thin marks of swimsuit straps would have asked.

“In Oxford.” He would have smiled. “I have read all your literature.”

“What's your view of the dreadful bombings last week?” That would be the woman's husband, standing stiffly beside her. “I understand several tourists were killed.”

“You must understand—” and then that other guide's face would have grown dark, “that we are struggling hard to establish ourselves as a nation in our own right, and no one is helping us. You might say we are trying to recreate, in hostile circumstances, a beautiful garden, such as once flourished here. Violence… such things are unpleasant, I think, but inevitable.”

“Where would you be without tourism? It's crazy, blowing people up!” And a thin boy with very short hair would have asked, scratching at his scalp, red from the sun, “Where did the people live? Why aren't there any houses?”

“Because,” that other guide would have declared, smiling again, “they were built of wood. And I expect you have seen the ants and termites in the grounds of your hotel? In two weeks one colony of termites can devour four tons of timber. The homes of the ancient Siddanese are nothing but dust blowing in the wind. Of course, now everything is painted with preservative.”

 

W
e can't blame these
other guides—times change—nor must we forget them: they are part of the picture too.

“But,” says our guide now, and I feel as if behind those thick, dark lenses he is staring straight at me, “they were telling—if we are charitable—half-truths. Sidda is the most misunderstood archaeological site on the face of the earth. Today, I will tell you facts.

“How many people do you think occupied this site? Five hundred? A thousand? The answer is none.
City
isn't really the appropriate term for Sidda. We think of cities as bustling centres of trade, places on a crossroads where people gather and live in close proximity. Sidda was indeed a busy place, but no one lived here. It was the creation of many people who lived scattered about in the surrounding lands, but it was not their home.

“It was one of the fundamental beliefs of the ancient Siddanese that
individuals
should leave nothing behind them. When a house fell into disuse, such materials as could not be reused were burned and the ashes scattered to the winds. And when a person died, their body was taken to a lonely place and left unguarded on the sand so that ants and vultures could feast upon the flesh. A year later, the bones were buried, without marking, deep in the desert sand. This way, please… ”

A trickle of sweat runs down between my shoulder blades, and somehow sand has slipped inside my shoes: I can feel the tiny grains pressing in. We gather quietly around our guide without him having to ask and wait for the two old ones to catch up, inching forward on the uneven ground.

“The only memorial allowed the dead can in fact be seen right at your feet: these countless pottery shards, which are all fragments of decorated bowls, some large, some small. The day of the bowl came after the day of the bones, and on it the dead person's relatives carried his or her drinking bowl to the city of Sidda and once within the confines of the city”—he holds up an imaginary bowl, then brings his hands suddenly down—“smashed it on the ground. Every night the day's shards were swept into the four sunken paths, gradually filling them, until, as you can see, they are almost level with the rest of the ground.”

The pottery fragments are dry, reddish and open-pored. As people shift on their feet I can hear them crunch and snap.

“But Sidda isn't simply a city of remembrance. It's also a monument. Two contradictory impulses were behind its painstaking creation: On the one hand a desire to honour the Siddanese way of life—obsession might be a better word, for it was long before they were in any danger of extinction that building commenced, and on the other, the urge to hide it from other peoples' understanding and, in particular, that of those coming after them. Sidda was built to impress, but not to inform. And largely, until now, it has succeeded.” He beckons; we draw more closely around and watch him reach into his pocket.

“Consider the alphabet. Here are examples of some of the commonest symbols. They consist of collections of dots and lines, up to thirty-nine of each per unit, which can be enclosed in a circle or a rectangle and arranged either horizontally or vertically in various orders. This is not a picture alphabet, but a phonetic one. Each unit represents a sound. A rectangle or a circular enclosure implies a stressed or unstressed sound—syllable is not the correct term, for the language of Sidda was composed literally of strings of sounds, each discrete. Now, please pass these around… ”

The piece I hold is roughly triangular, but slightly curved. The inside is smooth, and a slightly darker red. I turn it over: there they are, the ridges and the dots, carefully traced, perhaps with a twig.

“Close your eyes,” our guide says, “and touch it lightly with your fingertips… Yes. Can you feel the difference between the bumps and the holes? The ridges and the lines? I think you'll find that if you run your fingernail across, it's quite easy to count them rapidly.” We do so. The sound, like the buzz of tiny crickets, is all around me and continues as he speaks.

“You understand? This is an alphabet of the blind. But not, like our Braille, a second-hand thing, representing another alphabet, representing in turn a language spoken and invented by the sighted, that is, an alphabet
for
not
of
the blind. No. This alphabet represents a language created and spoken by the sightless, and the city around you was built entirely by a race of people who could not see.” I open my eyes briefly, am dazzled by the light, close them again.

“There are several theories. My colleague, Professor Nielsen, has recently published his theory that the Siddanese blinded their own offspring at birth, much as in some cultures the foreskin is automatically removed. And I believe Mossinsky has argued that the Siddanese were in fact a community of outcasts from the surrounding regions, where it is well known that many tribes expelled those with mental or physical abnormalities. The sightless, he argues, continued this custom in their own way by keeping themselves apart and developing a culture so arcane as to be impenetrable to the other groups and the tribes that had expelled them. Intriguing as both these hypotheses are, they do in the end seem over-elaborate to me. It seems far more likely that these people were, like myself, born sightless—” Everyone opens their eyes wide at this. “Or else victims of a progressive dulling of their sight due to genetically inherited disease, or the fearful intensity of the desert light.” One and all we stare at our elegant guide, peer at his close-fitting glasses, so very dark. Is he really telling the truth? But we don't dare ask, and anyway, he reads our minds.