The Isle of Blood (The Monstrumologist #3)(92)

It took more than an hour to cross the old Arab quarter of town. The narrow streets were crowded with donkey carts and gharries and villagers on foot—though there was none of the hustle and bustle that one finds in New York or London. In Crater there is much activity but little motion, for the town bakes in its punch bowl in the afternoon, when the sun fills the sky directly overhead and the shadows disappear, pinned down beneath your feet. The buildings were as drab as the surrounding countryside, tired-looking, even the newer colonial ones, slumping, it seemed to my eye, like painted gourds rotting in the sun.

We bounced along the hot, dusty street until the hot, dusty street came to an abrupt dead end. We had come to the head of Wadi Tawila, the Tawila Valley, where the volcanic heaps of hardened lava and ash reared high their bald heads toward the unforgiving sky. It was the end of civilization and of our gharry ride; we would hike up to the tanks along stone steps that snaked through a mountain defile. Our gharry-wallah said something to Rimbaud in French; I caught the word “l’eau.” Rimbaud shook his head and murmured, “Nous serons bien. Merci.”

“You see the problem,” he gasped over his shoulder as I followed him up the steps. “Look behind you. Spread out below in all her infertile glory is the town of Crater. Aden can’t get more than three inches of rainfall a year, but when it rains, it pours! The tanks were built to stop flooding, and to give the British something to do a thousand years later. Almost there.… Around this next bend…”

He stepped nimbly around an outcropping, stopped abruptly, and pointed down. We were standing on the lip of a large cone-shaped hole excavated from solid rock, fifty feet across at the top and at least as deep, shining brightly, like marble in the sun.

“Well, what do you think?” he asked. His face glistened with sweat, his shirtfront was soaked with it, and his cheeks were ablaze with either excitement or exertion.

“It’s a hole.”

“No, it’s a very big hole. And a very old hole. See how it shines like marble? That is not marble, though; it’s stucco.”

“It’s dry.”

“It’s the desert.”

“I mean, there’s no water in it.”

“This is just one of them. There are dozens all around these hills.”

“Are you going to show me all of them?”

He stared at me for a moment. In the sunlight his eyes appeared to have no color at all.

“Would you like to see my favorite spot in Aden?” he asked.

“Is it in the shade?”

“It isn’t far, about two hundred meters, and there might be some shade.”

“Shouldn’t we be getting back to the hotel? The doctor will be worried about us.”

“Why?”

“Because he expects to find us there.”

“Are you afraid of him?”

“No.”

“Does he beat you?”

“No. Never.”

“I see. He just cuts off your fingers.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You said something like that.”

“I think I’ll go back to the hotel,” I said, turning carefully around; I didn’t want to tumble into the pit.

“Wait. I promise it isn’t far, and we can rest there before hiking back down.”

“What is it?”

“A holy place.”

I narrowed my eyes at him suspiciously, and when I did, sweat dripped into my eyes and the world melted a little.

“A church?”

“Did I say that? No. I said ‘a holy place.’ Come, it is not far. I promise.”

We climbed another series of steps that ran along a low stone wall. I looked to my left and saw Crater spread out below us, the white-washed buildings undulating in the blistering heat. At the end of the wall, Rimbaud turned right, and we continued to climb up a wide dirt path that rose steeply toward the cloudless sky. The crunch of our shoes in the volcanic dust, the heaving of air in and out of our lungs—that was the only sound as we labored to the top, where the end of the path met the pale, bled-out blue of the sky. Cresting the hill, we found ourselves at the base of a small plateau five hundred feet above the extinct crater. Another series of steps led up to the top.

“How much farther?” I asked Rimbaud.

“We are almost there.”

We rested for a moment after this final ascent, in the slice of shade beneath an archway cut into a six-foot-high stone wall that curved out of sight in either direction, a barrier that encircled the holy place of sun and rock and silent sentinel stone, high above the sea.

We sat with our backs against the cool stone, and Rimbaud wrapped his lean arms around his upraised knees and stared dreamily down into the town nestled in the blasted guts of the dead volcano.

“So what do you think?” he asked. “The best view in Aden.”

“Is that why you brought me up here, to show me the view?” I returned. I was weak from the climb, overheated and terribly thirsty. Why had I agreed to come with him? I should have stayed at the hotel.

“No, but I thought you’d like it,” he said. “You are at the entrance to the Tour du Silence, the Tower of Silence, called Dakhma by the Parsi. It is a holy place, as I told you, forbidden to outsiders.”

“Then, why did you bring me here?”