Somewhere East of Life. Brian Aldiss
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to that whisper in the dark, taking comfort from it, he fell asleep.
Since the fatal day in Budapest, Burnell had suffered from nightmares.
The fan vaulting of Gloucester Cathedral, and the beauties of that carved fourteenth-century stone, faded into being. For a while he was transfixed by an angel eye, unwinking. But the stonework began to steam. He traversed again cartoon-cavernous cathedrals, followed the twist of cloister, transept, choir and nave, complex as a mesenchyme brain, flowing and changing like the undifferentiated tissue of which he had been composed in primal foetal life. He was drawn under elaborate lierne vaulting, rib intersecting rib intersecting ribbons of romanesque – grandiose, glutinous, ludicrous, lugubrious, the very intestines of dream. Ages passed in unholy umber illumination until caryatids came closer and their eyelids opened, to stream blood and tears as once more the frightened prisoner choked down an unclaimed eyeball. And Jim Irving was waking him.
A drab light, thick as mutton gravy, was filtering into the barracks. As they pulled on their boots, Burnell was shivering. He felt he would never unsee what he had seen.
Parading in a thin mist, the forces of West Georgia were a bedraggled lot. They mustered in the open, well wrapped and ill armed, saying little. The mules, protesting still, were led out from their stalls to be loaded with mortars and boxes of ammunition. Supervised by officers, cooks doled out a meat stew fortified by garlic, peppers, and tomatoes.
There followed one of those mysterious delays which afflict all armies. A radio signal had not arrived. Kaginovich, the Dead One, remained in the mosque. Everyone stood about in the open, smoking or sparring with a friend. The clouds crumbled, the mist cleared, and a yellow light flooded the scene, as if to spill forgiveness over the wicked ways of men. The quality of brightness enabled Burnell to put his dream behind him.
Illogically, he regretted they were leaving a spot he at least would never see again. The sensation was strong enough to prompt him to unhitch his pack and take out a camera. He walked about, photographing the battered mosque and its setting.
The Georgian officers began to take an interest. The big man with dull fair hair, whom Burnell had noticed the previous day, came forward. He wore a black SAS combat jacket. In tolerable English, he invited Burnell to photograph the officers. They all smiled ferociously and struck heroic poses for the camera, like a group of boys on an outing.
The vehicles started up with dramatic outbursts of smoke and noise. They left the camp in file, chugging off along a winding road that led eventually to Bogdanakhi. The infantry was to take a shorter, more precipitous route.
Kaginovich emerged at last. He shouted orders. The troops moved off, leaving a small detachment to guard the rear. Burnell and Irving went with the main body.
A copse of stunted trees had grown up round the mosque. As the file of men passed by, Burnell noticed field mortars among the trees, idly guarded by two soldiers from the rear detachment. The copse was terminated abruptly by a steep cliff, on the edge of which stood the mosque. Its mihrab wall faced due south over the precipice towards far-distant Mecca.
The force passed by the ruinous building, to pick its way over the lip of the cliff and down, on the first leg of a descent into the valley of the River Tskavani. That valley was as yet parcelled up in mist and shadow; there seemed no limit to its gloomy extent. The sound of running water filtered up, and the chipped song of a bird. So dramatic was the view, Burnell ran off several photographs, until he needed both hands for the descent, and put the camera away.
To some extent, Burnell was prepared for the rigours of the territory. After his phone call from ‘Tartary’ – a communication of which ‘Gus’ Stalinbrass no doubt had some knowledge – he had read up on the region. His oldest informant was Douglas W. Freshfield, whose book, Travels in the Central Caucasus and Bashan: Including Visits to Ararat and Tabreeze and Ascents of Kazbek and Elbruz, had been published by Longmans Green of London in 1869. The stalwart Victorian described the hardships of travel in the unlucky isthmus between Black and Caspian seas. But neither the hachures of Freshfield’s maps, nor the elegance of Kronheim’s illustrations, fortified Burnell sufficiently for the way in which the crumbling goat path they were now following threatened to pitch them down into the valley below.
Low scrub, often aromatic, grew underfoot. No flowering azaleas, which Freshfield had led Burnell to expect, flourished on these precipitous slopes. They had to progress at times on their bums, clutching at the scrub.
After half an hour of perilous progress, a dramatic change in the light altered the scene. Across the gulf of valley to the west, piled cumulus revealed themselves, their grey-blue mushrooms burgeoning from the compost of the Black Sea. No sooner had they materialized than they warmed from neutral colours into faded rose and then into bright pink. As the strengthening sun brought about this transformation, thunder sounded in the bellies of the clouds and they were lit from within by lightning – Japanese lanterns of a terrible beauty. They were in the world of the romantic artist, John Martin.
As progress improved, Burnell allowed his thoughts to wander. He recalled the boyhood trip to Iceland on which his father had taken him. It had been disastrous. As they scrambled up the slopes of Vatna Jokul, his father had said, ‘You’ve always been afraid of getting your hands dirty, Roy.’ They were filthy enough now to satisfy the old man.
His father belonged to ‘the old school’ – a school Burnell at once admired and resented. Earlier generations of Englishmen had regarded Transcaucasia as a legitimate part of the great globe with which the British were involved, to ruin or rule. Throughout the last century, British power had dwindled away. The British Isles were now a remote appendage of central EU power. So he found himself scrambling along under a petty warlord. Enjoying it, of course, he told himself.
Old Freshfield – a distant relation on Burnell’s mother’s side of the family – had travelled where he would in his day. He moved through Central Caucasus, grandly summoning up Russian colonels to mail his letters home, or post-chaising into the wilds at will. Among various travelling companions, Freshfield had numbered young Englishmen going to help build the Poti–Tiflis railway, then under construction. Now here was Burnell, with half his head missing, under the orders of an ambitious sadist known as the Dead One. A century and a half saw a change in everyone’s fate.
All day long, the West Georgian army worked its way down the slopes, men and animals, mainly in single file. Flies buzzed about them as the heat increased. It was known that the Tskavani valley harboured belts of radioactivity seeping from a local water-cooled nuclear power station which had been forced to close down. Nothing could be done about that hazard. Birds of prey wheeled overhead. Their numbers had increased recently.
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