A Trip to the Stars (33 page)

“I never heard of this Varcas,” he said finally, “but I can tell you, there are stranger stories than that out here. See that smaller mesa toward the mountains?”

I could barely detect a dark, boxy smudge on the horizon where he was pointing.

“That’s close to the caves where the Zunis believe our ancestors first emerged into this world. It’s called the ‘Forbidden Mesa,’ and even today no one ever goes there. No one could, even if they wanted to.”

“Why not?”

“Because no matter how far you travel toward it, it always stays that distance from you. You can’t get any closer. And that’s just as well, because if you did, you wouldn’t come back alive.” He poured
himself some more tea. “See, it’s said that there are four underworlds through which our people journeyed to arrive in this world. Each is illuminated by a different light: blue, white, red, and yellow.”

“Like the stars,” I interrupted him, my eyes widening, “from dwarves to novas.”

He nodded. “And the light is like starlight. In each world, its intensity grows. This world was darkness and gloom until the sun was placed in the sky, and then the world became all colors. But not at the Forbidden Mesa, where some of the first Zunis settled. Because they were half-blind and misshapen from their long climb through the bowels of the earth, which no one had marked before them, in this surface world they became monsters and strange beings—including werewolves and vampires. When there are earthquakes, more of them emerge, two, three at a time, and they go right to the Forbidden Mesa. There they can come and go, raising hell in this world, preying on the unsuspecting, nourishing themselves on blood, but no one can disturb them. Yes, your friar got it right, they never die because they are walking dead, and by now there must be thousands of them, so the fact he saw a few dozen a hundred years ago doesn’t surprise me a bit.”

“So you believe this?” I said.

“That he saw vampires? Sure. But they didn’t come here with the Spanish: you can’t ‘discover’ something that’s already there. You know, it’s the same old story, like ‘discovering’ America, or Mexico, or wherever. But I’ll tell you the most interesting thing about that mesa. The shamans say that these phantoms have built a city on the mesa the same size as the ancient sky-city whose ruins we’re sitting in. Houses, meeting halls, even cisterns that contain, not water, but blood. But it’s a ghost city, literally. The building materials are not stones and clay, but blocks of vapor and sheets of mist that are continually shifting and rearranging themselves. So from day to day the city’s contours are never the same, except one night every year. On the night of the winter solstice, the residents of Acoma stay indoors with their lights burning. They’re warned that if they venture outdoors and even once close their eyes in the night, when they open them they may find themselves transported to the ghost city, at the
mercy of its inhabitants and with no hope of seeing the sun rise again.”

Shielding my eyes, I peered at the Forbidden Mesa. “And no one’s lived to tell of this place?”

“Only the earliest shamans, who possessed great powers. And they died soon after recounting what they’d seen. You know, if you take an aerial photo of Acoma at night, it appears as a gray grid lit up silver. Well, no aerial photos ever pick up the Forbidden Mesa, much less its ghost city. That’s a fact. Some Zunis claimed that in trance states they saw the ghost city, and that ancient Acoma was modeled on such a vision, recorded by an old soothsayer called the Spider Woman.”

I thought about this. “You mean, like Newgate Prison?”

“Something like that.”

On the plane that morning he had told me that when the English rebuilt Newgate Prison in 1780, they used as a blueprint the terrifying etchings of imaginary prisons and torture chambers the Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi concocted thirty years earlier. “Or, as usual, life imitating art,” Calzas had observed drily. He had lectured me before that fantastical architecture was nothing less than the architecture of the future. Of cities and buildings, as yet unimagined, which in the present seem impossible, but must evolve eventually as a matter of course.

“Nothing is fantastical,” he said now, “it’s just unimagined. Think of the structures and contraptions visionaries put on paper long before they were ever built: skyscrapers, undersea tunnels, helicopters, submarines. Even interplanetary spacecraft, which were imagined by ancient astronomers centuries before the development of the science
behind
the science that could produce them. Space flight was like any new invention or piece of architecture: it first took form in the vapor of the human mind, then leapt into reality after a while, at some crucial juncture, and assumed earthly form.” He squinted into the hazy light at the Forbidden Mesa. “Ancient Acoma is one of those rare cities, like Alexandria and St. Petersburg, which was conceived in a single stroke and sprang up whole. Who knows how that happened.”

For a while we sat in silence. Then, with all the talk of vampires,
and people transported to ghost cities against their will, I began to worry about Sirius again. “You’re sure Sirius is all right?” I said, scanning the ruins behind us.

Calzas nodded. “He can take care of himself.”

“I hope so,” I said, stretching back into the sun and mopping my brow. “You know, you mentioned ancient astronomers who only imagined space travel. What about Uncle Junius’s blue amulet, and the other amulet you’ve been searching for—the Egyptian one that shows the far side of the moon?”

“What about them?”

“Well, they may prove that there was space travel back then.”

“If that’s so, you can be sure someone imagined it even earlier,” Calzas said, slipping his sunglasses on. “Don’t you see, that’s the way everything comes about, including people. Maybe the people, the objects, even the places that we glimpse in dreams, but have never seen on earth, are the ones which haven’t made the jump from our collective minds into reality. When they do, and we encounter them in solid form, we sometimes can’t understand why such a person, place, or thing seems so familiar.”

“Is that also something the shamans teach?”

“No,” he smiled, “that’s a theory of mine. Private stock.” He stood up. “Come on, let’s get going.”

I knew more about architecture on this trip and Calzas spent the next several hours leading me through the ancient city, showing me the sorts of foundations the early Zunis laid, the ingenious use of stairways and ladders to connect ascending warrens of apartments, the underground caves they expanded into granaries and storerooms, the hydraulics of the irrigation system in a place with little natural water. What most intrigued me, though, was the shamans’ healing chamber, which we visited at dusk.

The chamber was a spherical room carved out of the stone interior of the mesa, accessible only on all fours through a winding tunnel. The wind that hummed past us in the tunnel sounded like a chorus of low voices, maybe of all the men who had practiced their craft in that chamber. Whether they were welcoming us or warning us off I couldn’t tell as I crawled behind Calzas and the beam of his powerful flashlight. In the chamber itself, remarkably well preserved because of
its isolation from the elements, the shamans’ essential furnishings remained in place: in the center a low stone platform on which a man could lie down, a shelf carved into the wall, a deep basin, and a stone stool. Nothing made of wood, Calzas told me, or straw, or any other impermanent substance was allowed in the chamber. Only the naked human body on which the shaman, also naked, concentrated his healing powers. He could also make use of the narrow aperture—maybe three inches wide—bored into the smooth rock directly above the platform, revealed when Calzas slid a flat stone along runners grooved into the ceiling eight centuries before. This aperture turned out to be one end of a long cylindrical shaftway that rose on a diagonal into the open air, where a perfect circle of sky was visible. Watching the first stars appear in the darkening sky, I lay on the platform and imagined the thin beam of sunlight or moonlight that at precise times would shoot down like a laser onto my chest.

Before Calzas and I reached the head of the foot trail and, flashlights in hand, began our descent from the sky-city, I called to Sirius so many times that his name echoed through the ruins. I was really worried now, thinking he might never emerge. Calzas was worried, too, though he didn’t say so openly. He didn’t have to, for he had broken his silence and in his sternest voice begun calling to Sirius himself. Still, there was no sign of him, not a bark, nothing.

“I’m not leaving here till we find him,” I told Calzas. “Even if we have to search every adobe.”

“That would take more than one night,” Calzas said.

“I don’t care. What if he’s hurt somewhere?”

Furrowing his brow, he looked hard at me. “Let’s try something else first. We’ll descend as far as the plateau where he left us and summon him. If he doesn’t come, we’ll return here.”

“What good will that do?”

“Just a hunch. Trust me.”

I was certain we were wasting precious time and energy as we edged our way down the steep sandy incline to the plateau. The weeds clotting the trail smelled like ashes. In the dancing beams of our flashlights the rough terrain came alive. Not just the darting moths, clouds of mosquitoes, and wind-whipped grass, but suddenly things that shouldn’t have moved at all: the bushes and trees, the loose stones, and even the mammoth boulders, shifting this way and that as the light
caught them. The boulders shot off sparks when they bumped together, and beneath my feet the ground tilted. Only the pyramid of rocks surrounded by tall lavender grass appeared immobile.

“What’s going on?” I whispered to Calzas.

“Just stand still and everything will be still with you.” For once his voice betrayed his excitement. “It’s this place. This happens when the spirits are active.”

“You mean, from that other mesa?”

“No. The spirits of Acoma, which are benign. I’ve only seen it happen once.”

“When was that?” I said, stepping onto more level ground, to steady myself, even as I watched everything move with me.

“Shhh. Be still.”

By now night had fallen completely. Still low over the mountains, the moon bathed the desert in a pearly glow. Bats swooped from their perches in the cliff face, flashed into view, and then were swallowed up again by the darkness. The wind was picking up, too, howling through the rocks. But it was the stars over Acoma, blazing as if they were embers being fanned, that overwhelmed everything else. In that sky, the constellations glittered into place so distinctly that I could pick them out as easily as if I had unfolded a celestial map on which they were illustrated. Scorpio directly above, Libra, Centaurus, Hydra, Virgo, Pyxis the Compass, and, far to my right, Canis Major just above the mountains. Except that, oddly, I could not find its largest star, just off center, the Dog Star for which Sirius was named.

“Enzo,” Calzas said, taking my arm. “Call to him now. Just once, as loud as you can. And shine your light on the trail where we came down.”

When both our flashlights were trained there, I shouted, “Sirius!” drawing the syllables out even as they began to echo off the cliffs.

Both of us held our breath and strained our ears, for ten, fifteen, thirty seconds, when suddenly we heard a faint bark from high above. Then another.

I was about to shout again, but Calzas squeezed my shoulder and put his finger over his lips.

The barking grew fainter, then loud again, clearly in the ruins now, as it approached us. The closer the barking got, the more the terrain
grew still. Only the wind kept howling. But now when I moved, the bushes and boulders barely moved with me.

Finally, at the instant Sirius appeared in the beams of our flashlights, skidding down the trail, kicking up a cloud of sand, the earth fell still.

As I ran to greet him, he kept barking all the way into my arms. Then, throwing his head back so his eyes shimmered with moonlight, he growled deep in his chest—his entire body trembled—at that pyramid of rocks.

“Sirius, where were you?” I said, pulling him close.

Even Calzas was puzzled. Sirius’s head and chest were dry, the black fur coated with gray dust, but his hindquarters and tail were dripping wet. Neither Calzas nor I could think of a place in Acoma where Sirius might have been drenched like that. The only water was in cisterns, inaccessible to him down sheer drops.

Now he seemed eager to get off the mesa, and he barked at us to follow him down the trail.

“Why do you think he hid like that today?” I asked, turning to Calzas as we walked single file over the jagged rocks.

He shook his head. “He’ll always act strangely when he comes here,” he said finally. “You asked me when it was I saw the spirits move the stones here. It was the day I found Sirius, five years ago.”

All the way down the mesa, I thought about this and peppered Calzas with questions. But to what he had said he would only add that the Zuni spirits became active on very specific occasions: before a natural disaster, the birth or death of a powerful person or creature, or a visitation from what the Zunis called the outer world.

When we were able to walk side by side near the bottom, he pointed skyward into the great swirl of stars. “You see the Milky Way. The Zunis believe it is the spine of an enormous beast, seen from within its bowels. That’s where the earth is. Where human history is confined. Beyond the body of the beast is the outer world, populated by spirits more powerful than those here below. The Zunis say the Milky Way holds up the night, keeping fragments of darkness from falling on us. And just as Christians believe an angel in the form of a falling star may visit this world, so the Zunis receive rare visitations from beyond the Milky Way, the shell of the night. What little we know of the outer world—which otherwise is
like peering into blackness through the chink in a wall—comes to us in this way. Usually, we’re not even aware of such visitors.”

If Sirius was weary when he joined us on the plateau, by the time we reached the jeep he was utterly exhausted, eyes half-lidded, tongue hanging out. I brushed the dust from him and dried his hindquarters with a blanket before he jumped up into the rear seat and immediately fell asleep. It would be close to midnight before we were back at the Hotel Canopus, and at that moment, as Calzas raced the jeep along the snaking road to the main highway, I could not know that my life at the hotel, and the entire charmed world of Samax and his circle, were about to reach a turning point and would never again be the same. No, at that moment, I was still pondering Sirius’s disappearance in the sky-city and wondering if Dalia would be awake when we got home. And glancing up at the Milky Way, I was so taken with the notion that it prevented the darkness from raining down on us that I didn’t think to look beside it at Canis Major, where earlier I had seen no sign of Sirius, the Dog Star. Had I looked, I thought later, it must have been there—the brightest star in the sky.