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Post By The Hooded Hood explains the plot Sat Jun 19, 2004 at 06:43:03 am EDT |
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Colonel Blanchford Bertram and the Lost City of Mystery - Part the Twentieth: Blanchford Bertram and the Black Dome | |
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| Part the Twentieth: Blanchford Bertram and the Black Dome The Journal of Col. Blanchford Bertram, October 19th, 1873: I’m rewriting this section of my journal, encoding it using the Mi-Go algorithm taught me by the Kabuki Shoggoth in Shanghai, and then translating the resultant gloss into High Vesalian. That’s because I suspect I’m being followed. My loose baggage was expertly searched last night, and I suspect they were looking for this diary. Good thing I always keep it on my person. From Kathmandu I’ve been keeping special watch. All through Nepal I had a prickling between my shoulder blades – the kind I got at Antietam before I got that lead shot in my back. Knifey claims to have a prickling too, although how a talking knife can prickle I don’t care to know. But to start at the beginning… I suppose this voyage really started in the library at Parody Mansion, the headquarters of our League of Improbable Gentlemen. HV had been going through the trophy cases and had brought some of them out to be dusted and cleaned. I noticed an odd soapstone fragment that was laced with hundreds of tiny filigree metal strands, like tiny wires almost too small for the eye to see. No geological formation this. Somebody had somehow carved the metal patterns right through the very stone. According to the display card and the archive records, the fragment had been part of that blasphemous doorway that the Parrington Gold Mining Company blew up back in ’49 to accidentally release the Living Flatulence. That was apparently a major League case at the time, with substantial loss of life before the monster was destroyed. Dr Hopkins speculated that the doorway had used magnetic attraction somehow to keep the beastie in. But I was interested because I’d seen something like this soapstone before. It’s a unique blend with chips of a curious malachite embedded into it, and the only places I’d ever encountered it were Srihingar north of Lahore in India, and in a little marketplace in a nameless village in Nepal. Srihingar had a huge statue of some winged being carved from it in the Mughal style, but when I was there it had been shattered to pieces by fervent English missionaries. Still, the idea that this soapstone was technology fascinated me, and I started collecting other references to the stuff. It was clear that the source was somewhere north of India, but the breakthrough came from a traveller’s journal from 1612, in which one Florento de Clement describes a pair of ape-like statues of similar make to the late Srihingar sculpture, found in a high pass near Tibet’s Mount Shishapangma. All this smacked of a lost culture using unique methods and rare local materials. Find the quarry and you find the civilisation. That’s what brought me on this journey. I took three months coming up through Jalpur, Delhi, and Lucknow – met a fascinating chap called Hakenfakir in Delhi that I must look up again – and then into the mountains to Gorathpur and Kathmandu along the old silk road. Found a couple more fragments of that curious metal-laced silicate and a host of stories. They say in Tibet that a great race once lived on Mount Shishapangma. They were not beasts, nor yet gods, but they were more than humans. The Tibetans called them mi ma yin – Abhumans. They had a great city where no mortal could enter, and had once dwelled as men in the moon. But they warred with the khyad mtshar – Deviates – and their conflict threatened to destroy the whole world. So the mkha’ lha – Celestial Beings – stepped in to punish both sides alike, and the mi ma yin were imprisoned in ci yang med, a place of nothingness, beneath a dkar ci lim, a black dome. I picked up sherpas at Kodari. There was genuine fear amongst them when they knew I wanted to explore towards Mount Shishapangma, but the monks who were there to meet me brought good word from the Dalai Lama, and eventually I persuaded three brave brothers to make the attempt. The locals have many stories about the haunted heights, superstitions of abominable white-haired snowmen and of ghosts that hunt in the blizzard. Some whisper of a race of demons that can take human shape and dwell in the remote peaks where the winds never cease. All knew of the mi ma yin, but few would speak of them for fear of the wrath of the Celestial Ones. Three weeks brought me to the last road. We travelled mostly north, following the old trade route that has fallen into disuse since the civil wars of the chieftain of Nyarong and the King of Derge and the Horpa princes. Ever on our right on clear days we could see the vast peak of Everest, surely the tallest mountain in the world. What a challenge that would be. Perhaps one day? But I was set on Shishapangma. So we left the last known path and struck a path up the valleys to the foot of the mountain itself. I shall make careful – and coded – notes of our route, verifying where possible with longitudes and latitudes calculated by the stars. Knifey says I am getting too old for this kind of journey, but if only I can find the source of that strange technology, what a final voyage this could be! October 28th: Despite the loss of Chodak in the avalanche we continue to climb the west face of Shishapangma. We have had no more trouble with the Yetis since I fired off a couple of rounds and took down the pack leader. We’re now eighteen thousand feet above sea level and breathing is hard. The Tibetan summer is ending and the weather is becoming fierce, but I feel we are close to our objective. Today, for the third time, we found one of those soapstone and malachite carvings, shaped like neither man nor beast. It was mostly buried by snow, but I estimate that uncovered it must be fifty feet high. How came it to such a desolate place? What terrible labour heaved it there to watch over the hidden passes? I become desperate to know. October 31st Tsetsen is gone, crushed by the stone statue that hunted us all of yesterday and most of the night. It would have slaughtered us all if Knifey hadn’t managed to cleave its forehead, splitting its head to fragments. How such a monstrosity could be enchanted to move, or by what secret mechanisms the cogs and wheels inside it could have operated I do not know. We lost most of our supplies in the chase, and Jampa is eager to turn back. He feels we have trespassed on forbidden territory. But I am still curious, still intrigued. In the valley we found the thing we had been seeking: a great black dome of some kind of glass I have never encountered before. The surface is entirely frictionless, and able to turn bullets. The whole basin must have a diameter of more than five miles, and it rises as a smooth concave lens perhaps a half-mile high at its meniscus. Arrayed around the exterior are fragments of shattered buildings; at one point the remnants of an ancient road of fitted stone; and everywhere the signs of abandoned terraces and snow-choked dwellings. Knifey is interested in the barrier of the dkar ci lim. He feels that he might be able to penetrate its surface. Since supplies are getting low and Jampa is almost out of his mind with fear I suppose tomorrow we must turn back, but tonight my faithful blade and I will make one final attempt to penetrate this bizarre black wall and discover our lost city of mystery. December 19th They found me wandering in the passes, more dead than alive, clutching my diary and Knifey but nothing else. I think Knifey must have been pushing my body along after I lost consciousness, or the frostbite would have killed me. I have laid insensible for three weeks in the monastery at Sakya. Our experiment? Our grand attempt to pierce the barrier of the Celestial Ones? I do not know. Neither Knifey or I have any memory of that night, nor of Jampa’s fate. Nor do we know how I came by the soapstone amulet I was wearing beneath my ragged clothes, which I have dedicated at the temple’s altar. Knifey and I are agreed on one thing, though: we shall never return to this place. We both feel to our core that it would be our destruction. I shall conceal these codes notes so that none save my trusted intimates will ever comprehend them, and try to forget the tantalising promise of secret worlds beneath the black dome of Shishapangma. In our next exciting episode: The Observer has returned Mumphrey and Miss C to Earth, but he doesn’t like being blackmailed. So what’s the worst possible place he could have dropped our hapless heroes, do you think? Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2004 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2004 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
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