She Walks in Shadows(19)
“Er ... I ….” I swallowed, compounding my rudeness with a rude noise. “I did not mean to stare, madame. I only ….”
“The story,” she said. “That’s what you want?”
I nodded, half-holding my breath, as if it might break a spell. She sipped her tea and said, “Then come and look at the house with me.”
We returned to the front hall and she led me up the stairs to the big map. She said, “My name is Sima. A name from my land. We met here.” She pointed to a place in Africa dense with pins where no borders had been marked. “My home is beautiful,” she went on, sitting smoothly and quite naturally on a stair; I moved down a decorous three steps.
“Beautiful, Mr. Greene, and very, very old. I am not sure how old the nation of the white man is, but it was in its infancy when we had been who we were for fifty thousand years. And it was into this culture that my husband first strayed, more than ten years ago. I was young, and was not permitted to go with him and the men from my village as they explored the holy ruins nearby. But every evening when they returned, he would sit by the fire, tell stories ... he liked to draw pictures while he spoke and he eventually taught a few of us English. You could easily say that several of us became his friends, including myself, as silly as that may sound — a grown man and of his age! But we were friends all, nonetheless.
“All during the dry season, they made trips out to the holy ruins and the priests told him: You may draw what you see; you may copy the inscriptions, but you must take nothing. And the men from my village ensured that he did not, though Henley, you know, he’s … he was a very fiend for collecting things. Everywhere he went, his hands darted out, so, so, like the head of a bird, and he would pick up a little rock, or a fossil, or a feather or a flower or a seed, and put it in his pockets. How we loved to laugh at his pockets! We had none; everything we valued had a life and a place, and we would never have moved it.
“He filled books and books with this trip — he showed me, later — and he waved goodbye and left, on the funny things we had finally learned to call horses, all alone. And we did not think of him much again for a few years, when he returned once again at the end of the rainy season, with photographic equipment and more blank notebooks, and even hammers and chisels and shovels. The first night, we sat around the fire as always and when he saw me, he cried, ‘My friend Sima! How have you been?’ and I said, ‘I have been well!’
“Oh, my father laughed so loudly at the English we spoke. He said I sounded like our gray local bird, who imitates the things he hears. But I was pleased that he remembered me and I begged him to let me come with them the next day. ‘I know the ruins,’ I told him. ‘Every part of them, I know. We play there so often. Let me come with you!’ ‘Oh, no, my little parrot,’ he said. ‘That I shall not allow.’
“Well, Mr. Greene, I was a wild and wilful child, if you will believe it, and when they set off the next dawn, I followed. They swiftly outpaced me, being ahorse, but I knew well where they were going. Our ruins were circular, with a great tower at each of eight points on the circle, though much tumbledown, and one tall structure in the center. We sometimes called them Sun Stones, for the shape, like the sun. Although the walls were so beaten down by wind and rain that a man could walk through at many points if he cut away the vines, there was only one place where anything so big as a horse could pass, a great gate built of neatly cut basalt blocks, and it was for there that they made. As I followed them in, one of the men, Lemba, saw me and cried out for me to leave, but Henley said that I might stay, for I might have some use, perhaps to squeeze in the tight spaces that the grown men could not reach.
“Henley was asking the men about the ruins — who had made them? How long had they been there? Well, the second question we could not answer, none of us. Until the white man came, in fact, we did not realize that we measured time differently than he did. But we could answer the first, so my father’s friend Olumbi, who knew many stories, told him it was our own men doing the bidding of the old gods who could not speak. Who were these gods? asked Henley.
“Olumbi explained: All the gods of our land speak, and it was they who gave the power of speech to the lion and the jaguar, the buffalo, the eagle and the snake and the elephant. But the old gods had come before, so there had been no opportunity for them to be given this power from the gods who came after. The old gods who could not speak could still command, of course, because they were gods, so they commanded the men who lived there to build these structures, to carve them with holy words, and to bring the stone from far away. Henley had noticed that there was no basalt for many days’ walk around our village, which we had not noticed, us in the village, for of course we did not need to work stone. We had clay and wood enough. He taught us the words for basalt and granite, limestone and chalk, while we walked, and he showed us where it seemed as if the stones covering holes in the ground were also basalt, like the gate. I climbed the great tower and took rubbings for him.
“The men who built the ruins did not know just what they were doing, Olumbi explained — only that they must do it. And when it was done, the old gods came through freely, in silence. The men had built a door — as if all the world, Mr. Greene, was a hut, yet it had been built with no way in, and the men had chopped a door into the hut. When the men realized that this had been done, they cried out in regret and tried to destroy what they had made, but the old gods sent forth their servants, called shoggoths, and killed some men, and enslaved some, and went breaking and eating and burning all over the wide world, for the shoggoths could not be seen by man. They were terrible — like things from bad dreams. Then some wise men from a different land made the necessary magicks to hurl the old gods back to their unholy realm, and everyone began to rebuild our world, and soon this door was forgotten. It is a wonderful story.