The Elder Ice: A Harry Stubbs Adventure (9 page)

Harcourt was leaning forward, nodding. Mrs Crawford was not the dragonish woman who reigned in the office but someone I did not recognise.

“It was his theory that the tales referred, albeit in distorted form, to some historical events. He collected more and more versions of these stories and became convinced that both Ali Baba's and Aladdin’s cave referred to the same place. As you may be aware, Galland and Hammer-Purgstall did not take those stories from the original
Arabian Nights
but derived them from another Arabic book known to occultists. In the
Nights
, we find repeated references to an abandoned remnant of an unknown civilization, which also appears as the City of Brass, Irem, the City of Pillars and others. These cities are greater than anything ever seen. Adventurous men tried to plunder them… and unsleeping mechanical guardians sliced some of them to pieces.

“The professor’s findings were detailed and comprehensive, and he was roundly mocked for them. After
The Golden Bough
, the academics were more jealous of their domain than ever. This sort of intrusion from folklore goes hard. Of course, that only strengthened his belief, and the professor gathered even more material from ever more obscure sources. These included that occult Arabic work which is entirely discreditable—I think you know what I am referring to. Naturally, attempts to present his thesis were met with increasing hostility. He died without finding a publisher for his great manuscript, and in the end, only one person read the completed version. His secretary, who decided to pursue her own investigation.”

“I begin to grasp your situation,” said Harcourt.

“Historians do not yet accept the professor's lost cities, but there are myths, legends, and rumours. There is one continent yet to be explored and a certain Turkish map, with which you are surely acquainted, pointing to it. A wild Irish adventurer like Ernest Shackleton might be persuaded to the quest—if someone were to put him up to it.

“I looked through the explorers’ account and found some peculiarities in Shackleton’s descriptions, in particular the unseen presence that walked with him during the
Endurance
expedition – you know
The Waste Land?
Unfortunately, he was dead by then. I insinuated myself into the office of the solicitors managing his estate by forging a few references.”

“Was there a convenient vacancy just then, or did you create one?” Harcourt asked. “While we’re at it, what did your professor die of exactly?”

She ignored the questions, though she flushed slightly. “And that was when I started running across your trail. Wherever something related to Shackleton, there was your name. I made some enquiries. Your family goes back a long way, Mr Harcourt, and it has a particular reputation. I found about your friendship with Shackleton, and I saw you must be the one who guided him to look for traces of lost cities.”

“Shackleton's expeditions never looked for any such things,” I objected. “Nor found them.” Even as I said it, I recalled the chimerical Fata Morgana described by Sir Ernest and by Brown.

“Shackleton knew better than to broadcast that aspect of his mission,” said Mrs Crawford. “He never was a true gentleman, not as far as the Royal Geographical Society or His Majesty's government were concerned. He was no Robert Scott. If there was the prospect of real plunder, they wouldn't have given him a sniff of it.”

“He was an adventurer,” said Harcourt. “A man who would risk everything in pursuit of a glimmer dream where others could only see icy wastes.”

“You’re Abanezar,” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The sorcerer who pretends to be Aladdin’s uncle. He knew where the lamp was, but he couldn’t get it. Only Aladdin could do that, so Abanazar used him.”

“And Shackleton, and a few of those with him, did penetrate to some sort of ancient ruin somewhere in the ice,” said Mrs Crawford. “A remote outpost, like a lighthouse or a shepherd’s hut, but still a momentous discovery greater than the Valley of the Kings—and just as rich in its way. All they could bring back was what they could carry in their pockets. That was our biggest enigma, wasn't it, Stubbs? What would a man bring back if he did find Aladdin’s cave?”

“What indeed?” asked Harcourt. “Does your assistant know what he's been risking his life for?”

“In Aladdin’s cave,” said Mrs Crawford, “the most valuable item is not the pots of gold, or the fat jewels like coloured fruit. The most valuable item is”—she looked to me to finish the sentence.

“Aladdin’s lamp.”

“Indeed,” said Harcourt. “But what does that mean?”

“It is obvious,” Mrs Crawford said, I think for Harcourt’s benefit. “The fruits of science are the most valuable thing a society could produce. Not art, because art has no value outside of its place of origin. Oriental art means little to us. But machinery has a universal value.”

“What sort of machinery could you put in your pocket?” Harcourt challenged.

“Ancient Rome would not be impressed by our gold and jewels,” said Mrs Crawford. “They already have plenty of those. But a pocket watch, or a magnetic compass—those would be beyond the price of rubies, because the Romans never had anything like them. Imagine what wonders you could show them with a folding telescope. A barometer to forecast the weather would make you a greater prophet than the Sibyls. And a city whose science was as far in advance of ours as we are in advance of Rome, that would have devices you could carry in your pocket, which might astound the world. Like our many-bladed pocket companions with a dozen tools, but far more advanced.”

“Such as a portable wireless telephone,” I said. “Which was also a telescope.”

Harcourt gave me a startled look, as though a piece of furniture had spoken.

“A radio set which is more than just a radio,” she went on. “A device which both receives and transmits every form of electromagnetism. It might function as an electric lamp—or it could take X-ray photographs of your body and treat infections with healing radiations. Perhaps it could fill your muscles with energy so you have no need for food. That could send a telegraphic message to Australia or pluck knowledge from any library or newspaper office out of thin air. Navigate anywhere the surface of the earth by its magnetic field, like a bird—or transmit a fine beam that cuts flesh like a scimitar.”

Harcourt was nodding and smiling to himself at this litany.

“But how do you control such a device with so many different and complex operations?” she asked. “The most advanced science would produce the simplest possible means of control. Instead of hundreds of buttons and dials and levers, you have a servant who you command, by words and gestures, to carry out your will. A projection in the form of a willing slave—the Slave of the Lamp.”

“A genie,” I said aloud.

“Though the device is only described as a lamp in Aladdin. More often, it’s a brass cucurbit marked with Solomon’s seal. But it works through a sort of automaton that ignorant people might mistake for a genie. Or a devil.”

“Rawmaish,” said Connell. “Who are you trying to make a fool of?”

I recalled a scene in
Nanook of the North
, in which a singing voice from a gramophone baffles the Eskimo. That must have seemed like magic to him. And surely, a device made by some vastly more advanced civilisation would seem just as wondrous to us.

“Shackleton found just such a lamp, although, like Aladdin, he never knew the value of what he had. For him it was only important because it proved there was an ancient civilization. He wanted to go back and uncover a city, and he never gave up that hope.”

“He betrayed me,” said Harcourt. “He denied he ever found anything.”

“You tried to trick him, and he fooled you. And after he died, you started buying up anything of his that might have something secreted in it.” She gestured to the collection on the other side of the room. “Coats, skis, furniture. ‘New lamps for old’—but you never showed an interest in buying his papers. That was how I knew you were looking for the same object as me.”

“She’s a clever one,” said Connell.

She was probing, not wishing to give too much away but knowing she needed to move to get the other to respond. “I’ve done some work. You know my credentials now. But before I say more, Mr Stubbs and I need to know whether we’re merely dealing with a clever thief, or do you truly know where the lamp came from and how to command it?”

Harcourt considered the question a long minute. I did not like the situation. Both he and Connell were dangerous men, and calculations beyond my ken were taking place. The gambler weighed the situation then played his card.

“This lost city isn't just five thousand years old or yet fifty thousand.” He looked from me to Connell and back. “It was an old, old place five hundred thousand years ago. You know what that means? No, I can see you do not. What that means is that these ancients weren't human. They were an amphibious race that built their empire millions of years before man was ever thought of. What do you think of that?”

“I'll take my share of the trim now,” said Connell.

“You see,” snapped Harcourt. “You're too ignorant to begin to understand the truth.”

“What kind of race were they?” I suspected I might know already.

“You've already seen them, or their relatives,” said Mrs Crawford. “They are tardigrades. The slow walkers.”

“Tardigrades are minute.”

“Their ancestors were. But so were ours. They evolved before the dinosaurs, but they left no fossils.”

“They are the long sleepers,” said Harcourt loudly, as if delivering a political speech. “Their civilisation endured so long because whenever conditions deteriorated—a famine, or an ice age or some other cataclysm, or barbarians at the gates—they simply hibernate for a few millennia. They secrete themselves in their tombs while the earth purges itself of its toxins and recovers its vitality, or while the barbarians die off, and they wake to a new, refreshed world. They rebuild their cities in a matter of months with the aid of cyclopean labourers that they manufacture synthetically.”

“More genies,” scoffed Connell.

“No, not genies—and you'd not laugh if you saw one,” said Harcourt. “The ancients have no machinery, just monstrous living machines. All their vast libraries are condensed into what Mrs Crawford is pleased to call ‘lamps’.”

“What happened to them?” I asked.

“Can you still not understand? Nothing happened to them. 'That is not dead which can eternal lie.' The Ancients are sleeping yet beneath the great ice sheets, under the oceans and in the bowels of the Earth. Fifty thousand years might seem a long while to you, but for them it’s a pause no more significant than Parliament going into recess. No more than a good night’s sleep. But I tell you, they will awake one day.”

“And certain people are waiting for them,” said Mrs Crawford.

Harcourt looked up sharply.

“The ancients domesticated human beings during their last period of wakefulness,” she went on. “Certain families still remember their loyalty to those that sleep in the hills, and they guard the old magic. But I suppose that all the knowledge and power descends to your elder brother, and you do not inherit anything.”

“I suppose not.” Harcourt showed his teeth. “Primogeniture is not kind to younger brothers.”

“Alas,” she said, “some of us are left to make our own way in the world, to take what we can find.”

They say that two thieves in the night always recognise each other. There might have been some understanding between Harcourt and Mrs Crawford, but Connell and I were still shut out.

“Play your stupid game,” said Connell. “But I'm still getting my money.”

“I'm owed something, too,” I added, just for the sake of saying something. In truth, I craved explanation and inclusion in the conspiracy more than cash.

“This is more important than money,” said Harcourt. “I want to save the British Empire from ruination.”

At that moment, I began to doubt his sanity, if I had not before. And Mrs Crawford, whose sanity I never doubted, seemed to be playing him, provoking him further into madness.

“What ruination?” she asked.

“Don’t you read the papers? We’ve been slipping for decades, and the last do practically exhausted us. The Americans and the Germans produce more coal and steel than we do. Communist Russia and Japan are growing fast, and China... but here, home rule for Ireland, India’s next. Bits of the empire falling away like limbs off a leper.”

“All empires fail eventually,” said Mrs Crawford. “Rome, the Ottomans, the Moghuls.”

“All human empires,” corrected Harcourt. “But not theirs. Their empire has never fallen and never will. They sleep through the bad times and then they come back again, stronger than ever. The life of a human empire is like a day to them. If they become decadent over the course of a few thousand years, they sleep it off like a man recovering from a bender and go back to work the next day. They don't become degenerate as we are doing.”

“What’s that to us?” I asked.

“We are savages on the margins of a great empire,” he said hotly. “When they return, we can be their allies—we, the British. Like the Iceni when the Roman came, or the Princely States today in India. The Ancients are largely an underwater race; they won’t care much about what happens on land. We’ll give them a few islands for trading ports, like Hong Kong and Singapore are to us. And then see what we do to the Germans and the Americans and the French! Let me pick up one of their wireless telephones, and I’ll soon get through to the exchange and set the bells ringing. Wake up the sleepers!”

Connell snorted. As an Irishman, he might have had different views on the worth of Empire. Perhaps Shackleton, another Irishman, did too.

“We share the same aim,” said Mrs Crawford. “Although I see it more as a new Renaissance through ancient knowledge. In the fifteenth century, the rediscovery of a few Greek manuscripts in the Arabic transformed civilisation. What could we not do together with the knowledge of the ancients?” Her words were encouraging, but there was a false note.

“You break my door down and attack my colleague. Somehow I don't feel inclined to trust you.”