Kthaahthikha

I - 1200

I first heard of the city from an old moorish trader, whom I met in the deserts below Oran. He was a wizened figure, with the strange ashen hue that comes to some negroes in extreme old age. His name was Alim, and he was a man without a country.

I had been taking my way out into the deserts in search, it seemed, of my youth. I am an old man, and at the time I was no youth. The best of my years had passed me by and I was attempting, through some ludicrous device, to re-enact those feats that had made my name in the salons and academies, before greater talents superceded me and I was left to eke out my fortunes in a small garret in Whitechapel. God but an awful place, and the books I wrote gave no signs of freeing me of its soot-stained confines.

And so I begged, I saved, and I did all that was in my power, and in time a few easily-swayed fools gave me enough for a steamer's passage and a modicum of equipment.

But the servants had deserted the old man, and he was left leading his camel slowly into the shifting wastes, where, by some strange chance, I met this old Moor heading for the coast.

'And whom might you be?' he asked, in his polished, accented French. By this time we had made introductions and, it being close on night, made a camp by the road at a small stone well. It was a crumbling structure of stone, held in place without the benefit of mortar, and rose above the sands and gravel only a foot or so. it was not hard to imagine that, had I come across the Moor there only a few hours later, it would be to listen to his tales of a waterhole swallowed-up by the sands.

'My name is Eriksson,' I said. My father's father was a Swede who came to London for clouded reasons, and established there a spluttering line that had so far found its head in me alone. 'I'm an Englishman, on my way into the Sahara to attempt a study of the tribes.'

'Much lick to you,' said the Moor,' although little shall come your way.'

'I am aware of their hostile nature,' I said, 'yet I had hopes that, properly approached, they might prove amicable enough to allow a brief study.'

The Moor laughed at this, as he had every right to. I had never truly expected any success, and perhaps even thought that by dying in the deserts I might acheive some sort of immortality. In any event, I never held the servants in any low regard for their desertions.

I said as much to the Moor, who laughed again.

'You are a strange one, Englishman,' he said, 'to be seeking immortality in this place. I was raised in such an area, and love it dearly as a result, but even so I cannot help but wonder that you, hailing from such as lush place, should wish to spend your last moments here. Anymore than I should wish to die amongst the Antarctic ice.'

It was then that the Moor introduced himself as Alim ibn Karim Al-Khayri, and offered me food from his supplies. He had with him two camels, the one of which he rode whilst he led the other, and it was from the latter that he took some bread and meat. I took from my own camel a small quantity of biscuits and a tin of bullion beef, and we joined our supplies together and made a reasonable meal. In the heat of the tropics, in the desert especially - a hellish place when it comes to climate, the entire flat and arid expanse serving only to reflect and amplify the heat - few things keep well outside of jars and tins, but the beef was fine as was the bread, and the general consensus was that the meal was a fine one.

In time, sitting as we did isolate beneath the stars, the talk turned to travellers tales. I spun my yarn of adventures in the Balkans and in India, and recited my discovery of the ruins of Zathagar in Persia that, for a time, was enough to secure the interests of the mercurial public. My tales of the far south of Africa won especial interest from the Moor who, though he had travelled extensively throughout much of the northern world, had never been presented with the opurtunity to explore the extremes of his own continent.

When my own throat grew sore with speech, Alim took-up the thread of narrative with his own adventures. He had passed along the Barbary coat, and sojourned in the harsh, variant Canarias. By way of ship and caravan he had inquired into Portugal and Persia, and through it all with an open eye observed the goings-on around him. I was quite interested in his tales of Turkey, that seat of the Ottomans that has been the subject of a great deal of curiosity and speculation. He told of its arching domes, the strange spires of the Yeni mosque framed in vivid red and vermillion against the falling of the Oriental sun. I listened eagerly, and made comments on those things that I, too, had chanced to witness.

'There are a great many wonders in the world,' said I. 'And yet neither of us might ever hope to see them all.'

'No,' said the Moor, 'such is beyond any mortal man. Would that one might step beyond such confines, but alas that is confined to the denizens of stranger places than any we have ventured, and I doubt that the Prophet and almighty God would view such attempts with any great charity.'

I smiled at this. I was well-aquainted with many curious traditions, and had (wrongly, I supposed) taken this fellow as far to erudite to fall into such traps of superstition. Though it was dark, the firelight caught my teeth, and the Moors smile split his face amidst the mottled folds.

'You are taking me as quaint,' he said, 'and fair enough. I believe that there is only one God, and that Mohammed is his prophet, yet I have seen enough to know that I may be wrong. But I am assured that such beings as I alluded to exist, for though I have not seen them in the flesh - if flesh they be - I have seen traces of them that none might easily dismiss.

'And what might these traces be?' I asked, genuinely curious. I did not expect any great revelations, but only the whistful fantasies of a fellow traveller prone to imagination. Yet I had come to regard the fellow with enough respect to listen with an open mind and open ears.

'There is a city,' he said, ' that lies far away beyond the Black Sea, away amidst the mountainss in the dark of the forests.