Alice, The Eighty Year Old Mexican Peasant Woman Who Went To Oxford And Other Stories

ALICE THE EIGHTY YEAR OLD MEXICAN PEASANT WOMAN WHO WENT TO OXFORD AND OTHER STORIES PHILIP CONOVER LAZO

The Huautla Press/Prensas Editoras de Huautla Galeana 25, San Ángel, Ciudad de México, 01000

Primera edición, febrero de 2020 Número de Registro en el Registro Público del Derecho de Autor: 03-2020-03031237150014 Ciudad de México, 3 de marzo de 2020 ISBN 968-6744-08-0 D.R. copyright © Phillip Richard Conover Lazo Todos los derechos reservados

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I never imagined that I would write Short Stories although we had studied the form at school and I had become absorbed with its development so that when I came to write my first stories I was under the influence of my original endeavors at school. Specially, I remembered the stories that I loved Best: Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, Maugham’s, The Lotus Eater and Poe’s, The Mystery of The Rue Morgue. So that with these models in mind when I came to write my first stories I applied myself without further ado letting the story write itself, so to speak.

The first Story I wrote was The Fire that came in 1977 or thereabouts. It is largely the consequence of my hiking in the environs of The Ajusco Mountain and to the inside of the cone of the extinct Xitle volcano and of several visits to The Pyramid of Cuicuilco Arqueological Zone. I remember a time hiking with my esteemed friend, Fernando Catalano Candia high up in the Mountain of Ajusco, standing on the edge of a rocky outcrop beset by wind and mist when all of a sudden we were granted a view of the Valley of Mexico and the image of a hunter of long ago came to me, a hunter following some game, who had his first glimpse of the Valley as it was some two thousand years ago on the eve of the birth of the Xitle Volcano.

The second story I wrote was The Cat Woman of Paris or The Secret of The Rue Serpent which is in a sense the desire to bring back a remarkable Russian woman stranded by history in the sewers of Paris; living in the basement of a very old house I used to frequent, that was somehow connected to the ancient catacombs under the left embankment of La Seine.

There also lived my exalted and improbable friend Warren George Niesluchowski who deserves a story by himself but that I might not have time to write.

The third story I wrote was Titina and Antoinette which emerged from a remarkable dream that could have been a scene from a former life and that I should have developed into a novel because the extant story is only a fragment of what I perceived to have been a whole saga. It is a pity we are allotted such short time to write and perforce must establish priorities. In the dream I experienced at first hand the lives of a large family of aristocratic Brazilian Estanceiros who were immersed in the drama of slavery and ill acquired riches at the end of the XIX Century in what could have been the beginnings of the City of Manaus…

The fourth story I wrote was The Circle and this I owe entirely to my good friend Jack Doornart who told me many yarns of Canadian tree planters about The Bigfoot or Sasquatch, a legend of immemorial antiquity, which is quite real among the Indians of British Colombia and their fellow tree planters. A generous and happy person, Jack regaled me with many tales of outdoors British Colombia, ‘BC’, where he had emigrated from Belgium at the age of nineteen. He was travelling across Mexico in his ‘van’ with his dog Gandalf, an Alaska whom he claimed was half wolf, painting watercolors of the cities of i

Taxco and Cuernavaca which he called ‘típicos’, sold well at ‘The Bazaar Sabado’ in old San Angel. He gave me a book about The Bigfoot by Peter Byrne to the effect that I wrote the story in a single night and read it to him the next day; he then made some drawings of The Snowman to accompany the story. That same day we went to the Viveros de Coyoacán, a famous arboretum in Mexico City where he personally selected a tiny sapling of a pine tree, which we planted in our garden in celebration of my son Carlos whose arrival my wife Consuelo and I were expecting at the time. So that this story is associated with the birth of our son Carlos. The pine tree is now ten meters tall and about fifty centimeters in diameter.

My fifth story, Alice, I wrote in a single day and night in 1991 after I heard the news of Alice’s death. Alicia, whose full name was Alicia Resendiz. I have used a photograph of Naomi Campbell in lieu of Alice because unfortunately I do not have a photograph of Alice and that particular photo of Naomi reminded me strongly of Alice whom she resembled uncannily.

Alice would have liked Naomi Campbell and she would have appreciated her struggle as the first black model to establish herself in the fiercely competitive world of High Fashion dominated by white standards of beauty.

For many years I did not write another story although I kept a list of the stories I wanted to write. The writing and publishing of my novel Teo Nana Acatl intervened as did the demands for attention of other projects to which I gave priority. Finally, perhaps in celebration of the fifty years from 1968, and also because my ongoing project of The Method of Psychohistory was coming on strong, I got dawn to writing four of my longer stories in less than a year.

I inherited from my father The History of United States Naval Operations in WWII in eighteen volumes by Samuel Elliot Morison, who was a pupil of my grand-father at Saint Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. I read all of them at least twice, and some volumes like the one dedicated to The Battle of Guadalcanal, I read four times. On the one dedicated to The New Guinea Campaign, (Volume VIII), I came across, on page 84, a remarkable piece of information concerning a couple of turbaned individuals who were waving from among the debris and smoke of burning Japanese wrecks on a beach at the incoming landing boats of the first wave of the invasion of Hollandia. These two figures turned out to be messengers from a group of 120 Sikhs who had been captured by The Japanese at Singapore and brought to Hollandia as slave laborers to build airfields. Also there were 125 nuns and missionaries from different nationalities who had been collected

by The Japanese from diverse places in New Guinea and interned at a prison camp on the shores of Lake Sentani.

I began digesting and exploring this surreal image and could not resist it. I imagined a romance between the Captain of The Sikh Brigade and a young French nun from the Ursuline Order. And as a background to this war time romance, the phallocratic nature of War, conducted by men, with its subliminal sexual content implanted by terror.

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Of all the stories I wrote none gave me more pleasure, aside of Lake Sentani, than the Byzantine Woman, which I had originally intended to become a novel. I prepared for it over a long period of time establishing a possible chronology and sequence of events by rereading Georg Ostrogorki’s History of The Byzantine Empire and calibrating it with other sources. Much of it, of course derives from my own fantasy but I tried to steer an even course along the length of the Mediterranean and then keep to the inner chart of the internal voyage that Irene had set herself forth. I took some liberties with the dates surrounding some characters that were of my liking and that I considered important in the cultural life of The Mediterranean, and indeed in World History; like the Caliph Al-Mamoun, because of his relationship with the House of Wisdom in Baghdad and the Mu’tazil, a secret order of Sufis who were writing an encyclopedia of mysticism. The Caliph was not a contemporary of Eudocia Ingerina, he lived some years before, and Eudocia did not really die in 882 but lived on in my imagination. I made them coincide in time to underlie certain cultural similarities between Islamic Sufi mysticism and Byzantine monophicism in their mutual opposition to the Cult of Images which derived from a similar approach to the immanent, immaterial nature of The Divinity that cannot be represented pictorially without altering the Purity and Integrity of The Experience of Illumination as it was viewed by certain orders of Sufism and at certain Christian monasteries in Sinai, Palestine, Syria and Armenia.

Perhaps this was what the author of The Christos Pantocrator, and much latter, Andrei Rublev, were aiming at.

Characters like Ma’sudi and Ibrahim al-Balkhi are representative of the atemporal nature of Consciousness and its continuity in the development of Psychohistory; so are the Gardens of Samarkand, another metaphor from the age of Alexander, unchanged to his day, the water flowing through the same irrigation channels since the time of the Sogdia-Margiana Civilization some four thousand years ago, brilliant where the Sun touches them, their murmur reaches us in the twenty first Century to impart Grace to a Collective Memory that we share with all Mankind through the Unconscious, still fresh even in this day. So is the poetry of Ali ibn Hsin, who reins his horse by the River Guadalkebir to write a poem from the saddle, still fresh through the centuries. A message we receive through the agency of Señor Emilio Garcia Gomez, the XXth Century editor-translator and distinguished Spanish Arabist, who leaves us the spelling of the word ‘Guadalquivir’ to become a capricious whim which we follow, along the Stream of Time.

For quite some time I had put aside developing the story of The Eighty year old Mexican Peasant Woman who went to Oxford, a Story of South Eastern Mexico that beckoned me with special force to travel those roads again and inhale the special aroma of the evening breeze fragrant with the perfume of tropical flowers and exotic fruits in the gardens of Campeche, recollections of youth, when I took my Catamaran and our caravan to the coral coasts of the Caribbean Sea. Several currents sprung from my memory to find confluence in the Story: my friend Eleanor Lincoln transformed into Evelyn Linton; Uxmal, the sequestered destiny of The Mayan People, my own feelings that had brought me once to iii

wish to settle in The City of Campeche which inspired me to write; where I finished my novel, Teo Nana Acatl, and where I wrote some good poetry. Our adventures in our caravan with my children and my wife, our stay in Puerto Morelos, Quintana Roo, and our travels on the roads of the South East, claimed a place in my writing and challenged me.

The long title would seem audacious or excessive on first sight but it is not; it is amply justified by the extraordinary experience of Evelyn Linton that combined several cultural realities and ‘class’ differences contained in the irony that ‘she went to Oxford’; and in this I have deliberately used the word ‘peasant’ because it carries ‘tout le mépris de la bourgeoisie’ for the native campesinos of rural Mexico whom Eleanor Lincoln had learned to love in Guatemala, Chiapas and Yucatan. She was herself a refugee of McCarthyism as she expressed to me in more than one occasion because of her liaison with Robert Oppenheimer and friendship with Margaret Mead at UCLA and Columbia University.

Finally, there was that long-deferred rendezvous with Sertorius in the Isles of The Blest.

After I had read his biography by Plutarch, I had wanted to write about Sertorius who seemed to me one of the great romantic figures of Antiquity; whose experience in Spain and North Africa prefigured so much of our modern political turmoil. Plutarch’s mention of Sertorius encounter with a white doe is a metaphor, a white doe was a symbol of Entheogenic Experience in Antiquity and alerted me to the special greatness of Sertorius and of the special meaning of his Quest that had brought him to the Isles of The Blest beyond The Pillars of Hercules, into the unknown Ocean of the Canary Islands.

His encounter there with a Druid from Anglesey announced a Journey to The Beyond; in this case, to America, suggested by Pliny the Elder, in his Historia Naturalis, where he says that a boat full of strange brown men once arrived from The West to the Canary Isles and asked for water…

I changed the spelling of Suetonius name to Seutonius because it sounds better, to do something on his behalf, and to better honor his memory. I am also in debt with Laurette Séjourné and her book: Pensamiento y Religión en el México Antiguo (Fondo de Cultura Económico), which I highly recommend. Photographs in the text are from Wikipedia or from the Author’s private collection. The ones in Lake Sentani are official US Navy Photos in Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1960.

San Ángel, October 4th, 2019

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CONTENTS

Sertorius and The Druid (The Black Mirror of Tezcatepuca) .................................................. 1 The Byzantine Woman ......................................................................................................... 15 The Fire that Came ............................................................................................................... 38 The Eighty Year Old Mexican Peasant Woman who went to Oxford................................... 45 Lake Sentani.......................................................................................................................... 63 The Cat Woman of Paris or the Secret of the Rue Serpent .................................................. 89 Alice ...................................................................................................................................... 93 Titina and Antoinette.......................................................................................................... 103 The Circle ............................................................................................................................ 107

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SERTORIUS AND THE DRUID (THE BLACK MIRROR OF TEZCATEPUCA)

The Druids cutting the Mistletoe on the sixth day of the Moon, oil painting c. 1900,

by Henri Paul Motte (1846-1922).

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The famous astrologer John Dee used an Aztec obsidian mirror to see into the future, The Mirror of Tezcatepuca.

(J. Eric S. Thompson, Maya Astronomy).

According to Seutonius, Emperor Augustus had said that no one could be a Druid and a Roman citizen at the same time.

Apareció en muchas noches un gran resplandor que venía de la parte de Oriente, subía en alto y parecía de forma piramidal y con algunas llamas de fuego… De muy atrás tenían noticia y hallaban en sus historias que ya se acercaban los tiempos en que se habían de cumplir las cosas que dijo y pronosticó Quetzalcoatl… Y como el rey de Texcoco (Nezahualcoyotl) era tan consumado en todas las ciencias que ellos alcanzaban y sabían, en especial de la astrología confirmada con las profecías de sus pasados…

Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxóchitl, Obras Históricas II, pp. 113-4, Secretaría de Fomento, 1892.

My name is Gwenn Hawkeye and I was a Druid from the Island of Anglesey. A series of events and disagreements with the chiefs of the Order led to my eventual arrival in Gallaecia and Lusitania after a short stay in Gaul. I formed part of the Embassy that went to Mauretania to seek the leadership of Quintus Sertorius in our struggle against Rome, (83 BCE).

We met Sertorius at Tingis after he had defeated the army the Dictator Sulla had sent against him. He was on a beach by the River Ocean living in a tent. We came to him as he emerged from the sea after a swim, a powerful man he was, one eyed, a mighty warrior.

For many years I had myself undergone rigorous training both in mnemonic abilities and Bardic Lore until I emerged from the Bronze Tub and sang my song accompanied by a lire, composed over a whole night, being submerged in cold water with a heavy stone over my chest leaving only the nostrils free to breath. This song became famous and controversial, song by many bards at the gatherings in the Sacred Groves. For I had substituted The Mistletoe for the Mushroom Agarica Muscaria and had gone beyond The Portal and came back.

This was not accepted by the Chief Druid because I had become too knowledgeable and eloquent so I left for Gaul and later came to Gallaecia. While staying in the country of the Trinovantes I realized I had gone much beyond Druidic Lore when one day standing by a cliff overlooking the sea, I was suddenly transported to the other shore, to Gaul, by mere wishing it. From that day on I could cover great distances effortlessly. I told no one about this until I met Sertorius because he knew, as soon as he laid eyes on me, who I was. And we 2

seldom spoke a word between us because we could communicate by thinking, through our eyes, and this only happened to us after we went to the grave of the Giant Anteus.

Sertorius had had this grave excavated because he wanted to see for himself the remains of this Giant who turned out to be sixty cubits long. The City of Tingis had been named after his wife Tinga, they had had a son named Sophax who founded the town that bears his name. These Giants had lived at the Time of Atlantis before the Great Deluge as Plato recounts in his Critias.

It so happened that Sertorius wanted to know where I came from after I had mentioned the Legend of Atlantis and the story told by Critias. I said I had come from Britannia and Sertorius remarked that Britannia was a place of legends and ghosts which had been visited

by Pytheas, a Greek from Massilia who had written a book about it. It was then that someone mentioned The Isles of The Blest and how it had transpired that recently a long and narrow craft had come from the sea bearing some brown skinned strangers who asked for some food and water.

When asked where they came from they said that they came from Antillia, The Isles of The Blest, many Moons to the West across the Great Ocean. It was then that Sertorius and I began to understand each other and realized that we had come to Africa looking for one and the same thing--- The Isles of The Blest.

Sertorius confided to me that once in Lusitania a Druid from Gallaecia had come to him and given him a white doe that led him to a sacred grove where grew The Sacred Mushroom amanita muscaria and that when he ate of it he had crossed The Portal and come into The Isles of The Blest and there had had a vision of me and that he was to help me come to The Isles of The Blest. All this he told me without speaking, as a message from his mind, as we stood looking at each other in a trance.

So he had a ship placed at my disposal that took us to the Canary Islands so named because huge dogs where reputed to live on the Islands along with The Guanches who were the original inhabitants who claimed to be descended from the ancient Atlanteans. These Islands are also known as the Fortunate Islands because of their benevolent climate and great fertility.

And there at the beach in Tenerife I found a group of strange brown skinned men with elongated heads who claimed to have come from a land to the West beyond Ocean. They showed me their long boat, hollowed from a single tree trunk which they called a canue, it was four cubits wide by more than thirty cubits long. They insisted on calling themselves maia and said they wanted to go back to their land during the first part of the year as there were great storms in their native seas during the latter half. They asked me to join them and I did, I said yes. And what a sight they made running on the beach short as they were with their powerful torsos, long noses and sharp little eyes and their long hair tied behind their backs; they could throw their spears very far; no one in Sophax or Tingis could throw 3

a spear as far as they could, except for me, and this because after I had thrown it I could impart on the spear the force of my mind and make it glide farther and hit its mark. And this the Maia loved and held me as a great wizard and started calling me A-qaa, or Ku-KulKan, which in their tongue means: ‘flying serpent’.

Sertorius gave them a collection of iron tipped spears and all the salted fish they could store in their boat, in return the Maia gave him a jade encrusted breast plate beautiful to see, that they had brought from their land. While we were in Tenerife Sertorius and I went about talking to the Guanches to inquire how much they remembered about Atlantean Times.

They showed us a beautiful temple made of oricalc in a grove in a fertile valley not far from the coast. This temple had a very fine statue of Poseidon with his trident riding the waves, which was the delight of Sertorius who considered it an eminent proof of the existence of Atlantis. He went on to say that the Story of Atlantis was the most democratic Myth of Mankind because anybody could say what they pleased on the subject since there is no positive proof of its existence after it sank beneath the waves so that anyone can opine freely about Atlantis, yet this temple was definite proof of Atlantis, and said he would report it to the Roman Senate and have it written in the Sibylline Book of the College of Augurs.

I had agreed with Sertorius that I would accompany the Maia to The Isles of the Blessed, come back if I could, and report to him. We put out on this canoe, one sunny day in March, forty rowers we were, with two sails made of reeds and some of cotton to spare. They had contrived another smaller canoe which they had bought from the locals and had attached it laterally to the boat with two long poles as extensions, roped to the frames, to help stabilize the whole invention in rough weather. When I asked B’alaj, for that was the name of the young man who seemed to be the natural leader of the group, how it was that he had come upon such an original idea, he answered that all along their journey across the sea, he had thought of it and regretted it had not occurred to them before leaving home; but then again, they had not known that they were going to make such a long voyage.

We carried a lot of coconuts and salted fish aside from those fish that we caught large and small and literally sucked dry and devoured raw as a substitute for water. We also collected rain water in cotton cloth which we then passed into Calabash gourds and had palm leaf and cotton awnings to protect ourselves from the sun.

Thus we navigated for many days towards the North West, sometimes we rowed and sang, until a very strange thing happened. A fantastic ship emerged suddenly from the sky and took me away. It was a very large Black Thing like the helmet of a warrior that shot a beam of light at us in the middle of the night and lifted me up effortlessly into the inside of this flying ship and took me away into the black starry sky.

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It was The Chariot of The Gods, a Black Knight, operated by The Gods who took me into a spacious chamber surrounded by windows that gave to the Stars. They were glowing beings very much like us except that they wore very thin clothes like a second skin that glowed and they communicated directly, with their thoughts, like Sertorius and the High Druid.

They told me that they had been watching me since birth and that the time had come to instruct me with a mission but that first we were going to the Moon to meet the Elders.

They clothed me in a skin like their own and invited me to sit in a comfortable throne of which they had many around the windows of the ship. I had not felt afraid at all since I was taken; all the while I had been expecting something like this to happen ever since I began experiencing expanded awareness and my ability for fast travel. It came natural to me; it was part of my self-awareness since I was very young.

Nonetheless, this experience was profoundly moving as I felt my mind expanding with the new horizons I had been granted to see. And I saw the Moon approaching ever faster enlarging itself until it became a huge orb dominating the sky with all its features clearly perceived in wondrous light, coming from the sun, with our earth small in the distance, a clear orb blue and white sailing in the Night of the Cosmos as the Greeks say.

Very soon we came so close to the Moon that we could see the lights of cities and clearly visible structures emerging on the far side of the Moon, the face we can never see, with the distant Earth disappearing behind. Soon we landed in the inside of a huge building and descended from the craft to an environment that seemed to be made of polished metal and glass. We boarded a small flying craft and went through endless corridors until we came to a large hall with many people who seemed to be waiting for us.

There were men and women all attired like ourselves in thin skin clothes standing about a few small creatures, very thin, gray colored with large heads and brilliant dark eyes that 5

seemed empty, these were The Ancients. And to them I was taken and I felt immense Love as my mind was being charged, expanded, with an incredible amount of new knowledge that concerned my future and my identity. It seemed that I was to become Quetzalcoatl, The Flying Serpent. And that I was to go to a New World as a messenger of Culture.

As the message was transmitted everyone in the Great Hall came forward an touched me adding to the great fount of Love that I felt and thereby increasing my knowledge… I was then transported back to the craft I had secretly identified as ‘the black knight’ and taken back to our Planet Earth and deposited aboard the large canoe with my Maian friends where I continued to paddle as if nothing had happened. Indeed they had never been aware that I had been lifted from the boat, which was something uncanny that I have never been able to explain.

When the wind blew in our favor we caught speeds that were faster than anything I had seen in the Mediterranean; what with our paddling it was great sport and we cheered ourselves by singing Maian songs which by then I knew by heart accompanied by a flute, a drum and a conch. At night we would sleep comfortably stretching our limbs with ease, swim about during the day in calm weather and stand on the boat by turns to get our circulation going.

Eventually we came into The Sea of The Caribs, as my friends called it, that was full of the loveliest Islands some very large, others small, where we would rest for some days until after a couple of moons we came in sight of their Land which they called The Great Maayab and we landed in a Place called Zamanzama which was very beautiful, with large stone buildings near a wide sea lagoon called Bacalaar.

It seemed that my friends belonged to a guild of fishermen-merchants devoted to the Goddess Ix Chell that plied their wares along The Caribe Sea. The whole town came to meet us, rejoicing, waving branches of palm, they embraced us, not having seen the party of adventurous navigators for more than a year. They had deliberately sought to discover new lands beyond the Caribe Sea. And now they could point to me to prove their incredible accomplishment. And a priest came to us with incense burning.

They presented me as Ku-Kul-Kan from The East, a great spear thrower and linguist who had mastered the Maian language in a matter of weeks. So I dutifully threw a spear at a designated palm tree from a great distance and gave a speech in the Maian Language about the strength and perseverance of the rowers who had practically paddled their way across the Atlantic with sporting ease. Which was true and could not have been accomplished by anyone in the Mediterranean World; the Maia had a natural knowledge for the sea and could survive in it.

I was taken for a great Wizard in Zamanzama as I came to appreciate these people for their good humor and grace, quick intelligence and devotion to their Gods. Soon I found myself trying to dissuade them from the practice of human sacrifice; the very same topic that had 6

made me run afoul of The Counsel of Druids in my own land. For a while they accepted my entreaties that a sacrifice of fruits and flowers would suffice. Not for long, since soon after I left The Maayab for Anahuac I heard that The Maia had relapsed to their former practice of human sacrifice.

But I was successful in my conversations with the priests in persuading them that only Itzamná was real and that he other deities represented only different aspects of ‘Le Milieu Divine´; something that the more sensitive priests already knew or had an intuition thereof.

B’alaj Chan K’awiil who had been chief rower during our Atlantean Periplus decided to accompany me with some friends from the priestly caste on a Pilgrimage through the principal Maian cities.

We went to Calakmul, Seibal, Kaminaljuyu, Nakbe, Tikal, Altun Ha, Dzibilchaltun, Edzná, Kohunlich, Lamanai, Muyil, Bec, Toniná, Siaan K’aan, Uaxactun, Waka’, Xunantunich and many others along the sacbeob of The Great Mayaab. In all places we preached The Mystery of The One God, The Sacred Mushroom, Itzamna, as the source of true Knowledge and brotherly Love and the preference of fruit and flowers over human sacrifice. And this was called, to my surprise, The Cult of Quetzalcoatl or Kukulkan, instead of the renovated Cult of Itzamná.

During our sojourn at Kaminaljuyu we had met some Nahúa merchants from Teotihuacán who suggested we go to Tollán as this was a refined place from which Culture had spread in The Anahuac. We discovered that Tollán was the original name of Teotihuacán, The Great City of The Gods, a cosmopolitan place where many Gods found their adobe and Culture was irradiated. So we decided to go there.

But before we left for Tollán something quite extraordinary happened; we were given some mushroom shaped stones and invited to attend a velada or sacred vigil inside the inner chambers of the Temple of Kaminaljuyu dedicated to the God Izamna of Xibalba. We ate the sacred meal and entered into high trance wherefrom we left our bodies and experienced transcendental visions. I saw B’alaj Chan K’awiil aboard The Black Knight, The Flying Ship of The Gods going towards The Moon to meet the Ancestors. I realized then that he also was a messenger of Culture chosen by The Gods and that I should let him have an equal place in our mission.

After the velada was over B’alaj and I realized we could communicate directly through our minds without speaking. It was then that B’alaj showed me a little statue of the Roman god Jupiter which was given to him in Sophax by a blind poet who had a stall in the market place.

On our way to Teotihuacan, also known as Tollán, we passed through Mitla of The Zapotecs and preached there to a large congregation gathered from the many hidden valleys of Oaxaca. From Mitla we went to Cholula in the Highlands of Anahuac where they were building an immense pyramid. The Cholultecs said it did not matter how long it would take, how many generations it would take but they would not rest until their God, Quetzalcoatl 7

would have a worthy adobe. We preached to the Cholultecs our message of the One True God whom they insisted was The God Quetzalcoatl.

Tecaxic-Calixtlahuaca head

The priests of Cholula explained to us that they had consulted the Tonalpohualli, the Almanac of Destinies, and that around this time they had been expecting the arrival of two messengers from Mictlán, The under World; The Sacred Twins, who were to help Quetzalcoatl in the creation of a new species of men made from maiz dough. And that from there on the Full name of The God should be Ce Ácatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl. We took note of this as we wanted to have the story straight before we arrived to Tollán-Teotihuacán.

A large body of Cholultecans decided to accompany us to Tollán. We left in a pilgrimage to the Round Pyramid of Cuicuilco, the oldest in the Valley of Anahuac were the Mother Goddess Cihuacoatl presided from immemorial times. We came into the Valley between the two volcanoes, Popocatepetl and Iztaccíhuatl and went around bordering Lake Xochimilco until we came to Cuicuilco, a city by the lake which we were told was much older than Tollán. There was a college of priestesses there who came in a body to meet us, venerable ladies, one young and very beautiful, Quetzalpapatzin, who was the spokesperson and wanted to know who we were and from where we had come.

We said we came from the East, from The Great Maayab; that we were bearers of a Message from The One God. At which she answered that in Cuicuilco they already had The One Goddess Cihuacoatl and that they needed no more. We answered that we honored The Goddess; that we were passing through on our way to Tollán. To which she said that we were welcome and that we could stay as the guests of The Goddess for as long as we liked.

They took us to the Round Pyramid which was very old. The clans in Cuicuilco reckoned descent through the mother’s line, the houses in the town were round like the Castros in Gallaecia, and the women seemed free and proud. Specially Quetzalpapatzin who had great authority for her age. She had a large mane of curly hair, gold-green eyes, a full mouth like an African woman, golden skin and beautiful pear-shaped breasts. She explained that they 8

had always had The One Goddess and that they were at odds with Tollán who wanted to impose their God Quetzalcoatl on them. We assured them that we would intercede on their behalf with the priesthood of Tollan.

Next day we continued our journey by following the margins of Lake Texcoco which was in fact connected to Lake Xochimilco. We passed the towns of Tenanitla, Mixcoac, Tlacoquemecatl and Tacubaya until we reached the Hill of Chapultepetl where there was an ancient grove of Ahuehuetl by a spring where we camped, enjoying some Tamalli courtesy of the local ladies who had set up their stalls on our behalf. Eventually we came to a place called Ixtapalapa, our last call before we came to Tollán on the North side of the Lake opposite Cuicuilco.

Tollán was in a side valley that gave to the Lake, a busy hive of humans entertained in building huge pyramids under the Sun. They had a large avenue which they called the avenue of the dead all lined up with pyramids and temples surrounded by the various quarters of the City. We went to a quarter inhabited by Maian merchants that had many large buildings with courtyards full of apartments, living quarters and warehouses. Here we met some merchants from Kaminaljuyu whom we had known before and who were willing to share their apartments with us.

In this great metropolis you couldn’t just go out and preach on the streets you had to get in touch with the king and the college of priests. Up to that time we had been itinerant preachers of The Cult of Quetzalcoatl and Tollán was The Center for The Cult of Quetzalcoatl. We did not want to challenge anybody; we just wanted to exchange our views… Although B’alaj Chan K’awiil was a prince of Lamanai he was not here on official state business; yet his presence in the City was noticed and he was asked to appear before the ruling Council. There was no king at Teotihuacan, the City was ruled by a council representing the different tribes that had agreed to live there: Otomi, Totonac, Nahua, even neighboring Cuicuilcas, Tepanecs and Popolucas lived there and they were fast acquiring a new identity: Teotihuacanos. They had an international pantheon of deities presided by the God Quezalcoatl.

The Council was led by the High Priest, Kukumatz, who was the dominant figure, he was a nasty looking man, thin, long nosed, with tiny black eyes that sparkled with malignant jealousy. We had come through the streets of the city lined with many buildings of dressed stone which contained elements of paint and sculpture in intricate geometrical patterns interspersed with the figures of birds, serpents and cougars which were the emblems of the City. Later we found that the different quarters of the City corresponded to different guilds of traders and artisans: workers of obsidian, distillers of pulque, jewelers, makers of the amatl writing scrolls, diviners of horoscopes of the tonalpohualli , dentists, potters, tanners of pelts and many others, whose shops one could glimpse trough the wide archways leading to the interior of the patios of these multistory, multifamily buildings.

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The great central market was full of stalls with their wide rectangular cotton awnings and straw mats called petates on which were placed all the wares, fruits, vegetables, live animals and slaves that were being offered for trade. Beyond the market was The Avenue of The Dead leading to the temples of The Sun, The Moon and of Quetzalcoatl that were being built by stone cutters, porters, masons, painters, sculptors and priest-architects looking over tables at their designs carefully drawn in amatl paper of the talud-tablero large rectangular panels superimposed over the basal platform of the structures. These rectangular designs contained geometrical patterns of finely cut stone, milliards of pieces finely assembled decorated with three-dimensional sculpture in relief representing sea conch, stars, jaguars, and flying serpents all sacred to the God. The Chief Priest Kukumatz looked sternly at us but we responded with a chant in honor of The God Quetzalcoatl, raising our heads to the heavens and pointing our stretched arms towards the Pyramid of The Sun: How manifold it is what Thou hast made!

They are hidden from the face of men, O, sole God, like there is no other!

Thou didst create the World according to thy desire All the Spectrum of Creation Radiant The Quincunce: North, South, East and West Converging in the Point of Heaven where from You Radiant stand Silent Orb, Quetzalcoatl, Flying Serpent, You bring us light, pour forth Your Rays And transform them into Life!

Warmth, water, sea-shell and conch.

The mighty Jaguar and The Cougar do battle with The Snake; Day and Night under the Vault of Heaven, Diadem of Stars Is Your Wife, Cihuacoatl and Your Son, Xipe-Topec.

(The first four stanzas are from Akhenatem’s Hymn to The Sun) Thus we sang, your servant, Gwenn Hawkeye and B’alaj Chan K’awiil, The Twin Brothers, and the gathering of counselors and priests fell silent and prostrated with their face to the ground, arms out stretched. Kukumatz was unfazed and fled from the chamber in a rage.

We were proclaimed kings of Tollán, The Precious Twins.

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We were taken to The Pyramid of the Sun and from its height we sang to a multitude assembled The Hymn to The One God, a much longer version that lased past midday when The Orb was overhead. When Quetzalpapatzin in Cuicuilco heard that we had been made twin kings of Tollán she wanted to come and see us. We three put our heads together.

We realized that she was a great religious thinker who wanted to start a Pan-Anahuac religion based on a fusion of the Cuicuilcan Cihuacoatl and Quetzalcoatl of Tollán called The Marriage of The Gods. And that to make this come true we had to engage in ritual love making atop the Pyramids of Cuicuilco and Tollán.

It was agreed that I should accompany Quetzalpapatzin to Cuicuilco and there perform the Rite with her and that we should take in procession an image of Quetzalcoatl to the summit of the Pyramid of Cuicuilco to preside with The Godess Cihuacoatl over the Union. And that then we should return in procession to Tollán accompanied by the images of both Gods to fulfill the same ritual at the temple of The Sun in Tollán with B’alaj officiating.

This was announced from the summit of the Pyramids to the people of Tollán and Cuicuilco to great popular rejoicing and the processions and the rituals carried through with great ceremony to the effect that both Cities and the whole Valley of Anahuac were United and the rivalry between the Cities came to an end and an era of prosperity began that saw the enlargement of the Pyramids and of The Cities in the Valley of Anahuac.

On the personal level the effect was that the people desired that we three live in holy matrimony and appear together during public ceremonies. The construction of a Palace was begun for The Sacred Trio and a school were the new Theology was taught: The mysteries of the Quincunce, the central point in the middle of the four quarters, the cardinal points elevated to the pinnacle of spiritual realization symbolized by a pyramid and the magic formula of The Burning Water, The Atl-Tlachinoli, whereby one divests oneself from the material world in the process of ‘burning the sacred opposites’; in a constant battle with the self, through meditation and self-analysis. And in this the taking of The Sacred Plant, The Food of The Gods, The Teo Nana Ácatl, was fundamental, along with the knowledge of Philosophy and Mathematics, the Arts: the painting of murals and the realization of religious sculpture; also Medicine, Irrigation, Architecture and Astronomy. The Dean of the Faculty was a Mazatec called N’di-Shi-To. In time Quetzalpapatzin had twins: a boy and a girl; the boy, white with blue eyes and the girl golden, with green eyes. This was perceived as the great omen of The New Age and inscribed in the Tonalpohuali. They were named Mixcoatl and Xochiquetzal. In this New Theology B’alaj was seen as Xolotl, my twin brother and Quetzalpapatxin as Cihuacoatl, our mother because she remained The High Prietess at Cuicuilco. She was held to be the Goddess who ground the corn to make the dough wherefrom sprung the New Race of Men made of Maize Dough.

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A brilliant young architect named Tenoch designed the Palace where we lived. It had a frontal wall of dressed stone with a single large rectangular window to let the light into an open court that had a ramp ascending to a platform where stood the boxlike body of the palace in a clean dressed stone facade that had eight doors that played with a light and shadow effect with the Sun and with eight identical windows on a second floor. Sculpted in relief over the second story windows flew a plumbed serpent inside a talud-tablero the whole length of the building. Inside the building, there was another ramp leading to a suite of spacious rooms that gave to interior courtyards. These suites had polished wooden floors and high ceilings supported by very long wooden beams that were made of half a tree with the bark left on and treated with bee’s wax. Thanks to this ingenious design in three different levels the whole building could be easily defended by a few men. This palace was called The Quetzalpapalotl of Quetzalpapatzin.

B’alaj had several wives but I only had Quetzalpapatzin of whom I had grown very fond.

We talked about theology and of the Land I had come from. I sang for her in Kelt and she sang for me in Nahuatl accompanied by a lute made of reed which she played beautifully.

The school we had established became very popular and may young students came from as far as The Maayab and Zapotec Mitla so that the new theology and the new sciences started to spread. Our children were growing and were our delight.

B’alaj started drinking pulque and consorting with strange women; there was one in particular whom we did not trust, one Ixtabentum who was giving B’alaj some liquor that she made. One day Quetzalpapatzin came to me and showed me a mirror of black obsidian.

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She said: ‘this is the Dark Mirror, The Smoking Mirror of Texcatlipoca the God of the underworld, Mictlan’. We looked into the mirror and saw the image of Ixtabentum consorting with Kukumatz. Too late we found out that she had been sent by Kukumatz. ‘You must do something’, she said. I was lured to a place called Texcuco on the pretext of a feast that Ixtabentum would attend. That very day an army of Totonacs and Popolucas led by Kukumatz invaded Tollán, sacked the Palace, burned the temples and the School, caught and beheaded B’alaj, killed Quetzalpapatzin and the children… and set out looking for me.

I was hidden by my friends from Texcuco, and later fled to Cholula, were King Topiltzin of Zinancantan offered to invade Tollán on my behalf. I declined because I did not wish more bloodshed and destruction. Soon after I left for Tabasco pursued by a host of Totonacs.

I found myself in great trouble and grief; I seemed to have lost my powers… we hardly had got to the coast in a place called Xicalango when the Totonacs caught up with us on a beach and started throwing spears at our men, killing several. We got into a large canoe that was to take us to Yucatan when at the last moment, a large craft appeared in the sky, The Chariot of The Gods, and took me from the boat into the sky where I hovered over my amazed mates who started crying: ‘Quetzalcoatl, don’t leave us!’ but it was too late; I was already half way in the sky, before I managed to cry back: ‘I will return!’. I had finally become: The Flying Serpent!

2 Inside the craft I met a very beautiful woman with white hair in one of those skin-tight light suits I had worn before who said that she was my sponsor and if I could please come forward and be saluted by the crew. They all wanted to touch me and hailed me as one of their number. I was overwhelmed and had not a word to say, I was still grieving for Quetzalpapatzin and our children. Maya, for this was the woman’s name, told me, speaking through her mind, telepathically, not to worry, for in time I would meet Quetzalpapatzin and the children again. She said that it was she who had received my powerful signal when I was in the copper tub during my Druidic initiation at the Isle of Anglesey, that she had followed the composition of my poem and had decided to become my sponsor in front of The Council of Nine and had proposed that I should become a Messenger of Culture.

She explained to me that my family was in The Garden Planet, a sort of Isle of The Blest, and that in Time I would see them. She told me that she, herself, came from the Garden Planet where her Mentor, Monat Garratut, who was an Ancestor from Tau Ceti, would sponsor me in front of The Council. But that lay ahead in The Future. They were now going to deposit me in Sertorius Camp. Maya took me to a special cubicle where I could wash myself and rest before we would arrive over Sertorius’ camp. I found there a goblet with a delicious drink that nourished me and restored my strength. After a while Maya came into the cubicle and asked: ‘are you ready?’ I answered that I was. ‘We will tele-transport you to a place near Sertorius camp which is outside the City of Tarraco in the mountains of North-East 13

Hispania’. She came forward to touch me. She placed the palm of her hand over my heart and said: ‘good-bye, Quetzalcoatl, we will meet again.’

I stood inside a special crystal cylinder surrounded by the assembled company. I received their well wishes and love and could feel that even for them this was a momentous experience. There was a flash of light, I entered a vortex of quick shifting geometrical patterns like those of an Alexandrian kaleidoscope I had once observed in Massilia, not unlike my trance experience with the Sacred Plant, entered a portal of time-space, and was suddenly landed in a forest in the middle of the night under the stars.

The air was fresh and it smelled of pine, I was grateful to be in a forest of pine and feel again the fresh mountain air and crunching needles and soft moss under my feet so familiar to me since my childhood days in Anglesey. I saw the light of a fire ahead and the figure of Sertorius approaching: ‘I was thinking of you just now, Druid, It has been ten years. Where do you hail from, are you a wondering ghost sprung from Hades?’, ‘Indeed, my friend, sprung from Hades.’

We stood there looking at each other for a long time interchanging volumes of narrative at the speed of light, the whole story of our intervening lives. ‘We are sad heroes, he said at last,’ I am afraid my life is at an end, dear friend; that pig, Perpenna, is aiming to kill me and take my place.’

Next day a feast was given by Marcus Perpenna Vento in honor of Quintus Sertorius. I was there. When it was over Sertorius laid dead, stabbed by Perpenna in the back. I left for Gallaecia, never to return.

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THE BYZANTINE WOMAN

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At that time my name was Inga-Lena and I lived in the City of Kiev were my father Rurik was Voivode.

At the age of thirteen I was given in marriage to Rollo Turgeiis, a kinsman of my father from Uppsala.

For a time we lived in the Island of Gottland where Rollo was a merchant. He had other wives and we shared his bed or slept together on his loft. I was his favorite and accompanied him in his Drakkard to Polotsk where the River Volga is born.

He was good to me and taught me many things: sword play, archery and how to attack with a knife.

He taught me many things in bed too and used me as a boy from behind, dressed me as a boy when we were in the river because he thought I had a better chance to survive. But this was my undoing because when we were attacked by Ragnar Thorvald, one of his rivals in the slave trade, he killed Rollo in single combat, mistook me for a boy and took me as one of his boys.

When he found out I was a woman and Rurik’s daughter he didn’t care, he was afraid of no one, he took me down river and sold me to an Arab merchant from Crete for a very large sum because I had grown and had a full figure and was very fierce. This was at the time of the regency of the Caesar Bardas when your father was young.

I was taken to Iskandariyya in Egypt and given to the Bay in his harem and dressed like an Arab woman and taught to dance and play the lute and use cosmetics; apply unguents and oils and give massages. I was taught Arabic and to read The Coran, yet I always prayed to Freya to deliver me from the Arabs and the Romani and I never grew fat because the Bay let me ride horses and admired my archery and fencing and took me to al-Qahirah to meet the Sultan because he knew who Rurik was and had decided to send me back to my father with presents.

So I was sent with the Bay to Damietta to seek passage to Querson and go up the Dnieper to Kiev, when the Caesar Bardas and your father attacked Damietta and seized the fortress and found me there. We fell in love at first sight your father and I. He took me for himself even though his mother wanted him to marry Eudocia Decapolita.

In 853 your father was seventeen and I was fourteen years old, he took me to the Magnaura and made me his mistress. He could not do without me and kept me in his bed until he invited his stable boy Basil to be his parakoimemenos and sleep in the room next to us. We became intimate the three of us. At first it grieved me to see your father so infatuated with this Macedonian and the subtle deception Basil was operating on him. Basil was very strong and handsome, a charming man of enormous ambition who had taught himself many things. He was clearly aiming for supreme power in the State but your father did not see this, so infatuated he was in his desire for Basil’s company that he took him to our bed, and it happened in this manner: Your great uncle, the Caesar Bardas had an estate in Cappadocia where we went because we wanted to explore the underground City of Derinkuyu. We had been ridding for some days in the country sleeping in the royal tent when we came to Derinkuyu. The beautiful horsemanship of Basil had excited us, his way with horses, talking to them caressing, his feeding and handling of them was equal to the extraordinary effect he had on people. He seemed to read your thoughts and charmingly anticipate your every need to the point that we fell in love with him. He was courageous and in more than one occasion saved us from Turkic marauding parties.

In the underground passages of the City of Derinkuyu we came to a large vaulted room that had been used as a school with many secret side chambers that led to a refectory with storage rooms.

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We had separated from your father and Basil took me aside into one of these chambers and made love to me. That night in the royal tent he took us both and made us his lovers. From then on, we became inseparable and shared all our thoughts.

When your grandfather the Emperor Theophilos died your father was six years old, your grandmother, Theodora, became Regent supported by her brothers, your great uncles Bardas and Petronas, both brave, intelligent men. Your uncle Bardas supported your father in his struggle with his mother, the Dowager Empress. Your father did not like the influence the Logothete Teoktistos had over your grandmother with his iconodule ideas and sympathies for the Western Emperor Louis and Pope Nicholas. He wanted your father to marry Eudocia Decapolita whose family belonged to the iconodule faction of Paphlagonia. Your great uncle Bardas supported the Metropolitan Photius in his struggle against Rome who in turn supported him in his desire to create a new University in the Palace of Magnaura with Leo, the Mathematician, as Rector.

So that there was a lot of intrigue and interests surrounding your father’s wedding with Eudocia Decapolita to which he had to accede notwithstanding his love of me. He had Basil marry me so he could be near both of us; a decision that proved fatal given your great uncle Bardas support of him in his struggle with his mother over supreme power in the State. As it turned out it had not been necessary that he marry Eudocia Decapolita, as a few months later your great uncle and your father seized power and had your grandmother and your aunt Thekla banished to the nunnery of Gastria.

We continued to live as before and shared the same bed, the three of us, as your father repudiated his wife after he became Emperor and brought back your aunt Thekla from the nunnery to be Basil’s lover as a consolation prize. He officially changed my name from Inga-Lena to Eudocia Ingerina to signal to the people that I was the real Empress.

Your father had become so infatuated with Basil and enjoyed so much being taken from behind that he made Basil Co-Emperor as if he were married to him and in this your father resembled Eliogabalus; even though he was far braver than Eliogabalus as everyone knows, he distinguished himself by personally leading his armies in battle in many campaigns, alongside your great uncle Petronas. In this he resembled more the great Julius Caesar, who in his youth, had acted as ephebus for King Nicomedes IV of Bythnia and was known to have kept his engeneer Mamurra for this service and might have had a special relationship of this sort with his nephew Octavian; if we are to believe Mark Anthony.

All that Basil learnt about statecraft he owes to your father and your great-uncle the Caesar Bardas; to the conversations that he overheard, to the analysis of the policies that they made and the historical investigations he undertook on his own, because he was self-taught, this made him identify with the Emperor Justinian, who was of peasant origin like himself. But before this, the widow Danielis, who was a very rich woman who had taken up Basil to be her lover when he was a youth, had taught him to be sagacious and ruthless. She awoke in him a boundless ambition and gave him money. While they were in bed the widow taught him how to use his strength, his beauty and his sexual charisma.

The fact remains that towards the end of his life your father became attracted to the courtier Basiliskianos and wanted to make him Co-Emperor, something which made Basil extremely uneasy

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and jealous. And so had your father killed. I am telling you this because you have now become of age and I want you to know who I really am and who your real father was.

I was not the daughter of Inger Martinakios, the Varangian. This story was put forward at Court at the time of my arrival from Egypt to hide the fact that I was Rus; in fact, I am the daughter of the Voivode Rurik, Prince of Kiev, who was held to be a pagan and a barbarian by the Romans. When in fact he was from the Royal House of Uppsala, a very brave man of whom you should be proud, my dear Leo, by Freya!

This extraordinary monologue was held in a balcony of the Royal Palace overlooking the Bosphorous, between the Empress Eudocia Ingerina and her son Leo, the future Emperor Leo VI who would be known as Leo VI, the Wise.

And now I must see the ambassador from the Caliph, the historian Mas’udi who wants a copy of the Geographia of Ptolemy for The House of Wisdom in Baghdad.

I listened to her attentively because I wanted to learn all I could about my father whom I had hardly known. My brother Stephen and I were not sons of Basil. Basil castrated my brother Stephen when he was a child; what father would castrate his own son. Basil knew we were not his children.

The Empress made her way to the great Hall of The Ambassadors. Mas’udi was a very charming gentleman who was held to be one of the most enlightened persons then living in the Mediterranean. He had travelled far and wide and was thought to be a member of the secret order of the Muta’zili who were writing a secret encyclopedia of mystical knowledge to which the Empress Eudocia Ingerina had become a patron and secret correspondent ever since her days as the slave of Mulay Firduz al-Bardawi, the Bay of Iskandariyya, who had treated her well and taught her so much.

The interview with Mas’udi went well, she always enjoyed the wit and the rich conversation of this man of the World who was informed about Britannia, the kingdoms of West Africa, Central Asia and Sinan. He brought greetings from two members of the Order: Abu Zayd al-Balhki of Balhk and Rashiq al-Wardami, also known as Leo of Tripoli, a Byzantine renegade who was now an Admiral of The Caliph’s fleet and had been a Mardaite of the Theme of The Cibyrrhaeots.

She had shared her love of Islamic Culture with Michael, The Emperor Michel III, who had been quite cynical about The Orthodox Church, its rites and cult of the Icons which he did not share.

Secretly she continued to back the Monophisite Bishops who shared many theological attitudes with the Islamic Muta’zili and The Sufi.

– Give this Copy of the Geographia to The Caliph al-Mamun and tell him that I personally supervised the edition.

– Your Grace is most generous, there are many who admire you in al-Islamiyya, specially at The House of Wisdom, The Seven Pillared Worthy House, Allah be praised (and here Mas’udi touched his heart and his forehead), wish you could visit us in Baghdad. Abu Zayd sends this present from Balkh –. And he gave her Majesty a copy of The Diamond Sutra, a revered text of The Mahayana that The Empress had for a long time wished to possess. The Empress was visibly moved, this wonderful text, coming from Balkh, an ancient center of Buddhism, Islam and Zoroastrianism.

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– It is my wish too, dear friend, and perhaps I will one day –, and with this signal of regal intent at which Mas’udi raised his brow because this woman did not make idle promises; he bowed deeply and made his leave, backing slowly, for no one ever turned their back on a Byzantine Empress.

2

She made her way to her rooms followed by Briseis, her favorite slave, and there in one of the small dressing rooms lined with gilded mirrors and Persian carpets she made her lie on a silk couch and took her. She was an Eritrean beauty and had been a gift from The Caliph al-Mamoun, and to signify her pleasure and a fond memory in the association, she pinched her labia and introduced two fingers inside her until she moaned with pleasure and obtained an orgasm from her. Give and you shall receive; she thought of The Caliph Mamoun and the fine work she had done preparing The Geographia, her contribution to peace in the Mediterranean.

She then took Briseis to a special area of her royal apartments where she was concocting unguents and perfumes from plants that were brought to her from distant lands; from Francia and Samarkand, India and Africa. It was a busy hive of industry; there, women and eunuchs of all ages, working under her supervision, bottling exotic perfumes in beautiful phials of colored glass, of silver and golden stoppers; delightful jars of capricious shapes and forms containing unguents, sources of everlasting youth, that she exported all over the known world from the Queen of Cities, Constantinople.

– We are going to Corfu, Briseis, get ready –.

– As you command, my Lady –. And the girl instantly prostrated full length, face dawn, in the smooth marble floor in front of her Lady, with her arms fully stretched as required by protocol.

– Get up, you silly girl, on the double, and accompany me –.

– I am your servant, Sayyida –.

She had taught Briseis all she knew about the martial arts and so now they dressed as men, wore false moustache and bound their breasts under tight cloth. When night came they descended through secret passageways to the Royal wharves where a fast single-banked galea awaited them.

The Marmora shone under the silver moonlight and the smooth rhythm of the oars made the long sleek dromon glide imperceptibly under the walls of Constantinople. She had picked a young Cilicean Captain, Mavros Estilitzes, whom she liked because he was daring and discreet, rather handsome in a melancholic sort of way, a Mardaite, both a follower of Saint Simeon Stilitzes and of Saint Simeon the Mad also known as ‘God’s Fool’. He was a kinsman of Leon of Tripoli whom she hoped to meet at a secret rendez-vous on the Island of Corfu inside the inlet of Cape Drastis where they had met before. The galea could hide there and await his coming towards the end of May; the full moon of May 882, that is.

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When Basil discovered that she was gone he would have to declare her dead. He would never publicly avow to her flight. He would never know where she had gone; only her son Leo knew, and he would never tell.

The crew of the galea were all Mardaites from Cilicia and they were going to join Leon of Tripoli.

She had stashed enough treasure under the bows to last her a lifetime but most of all, she had Briseis and Leon of Tripoli, the loves of her life. She could no longer take the hypocrisy of the Iconodule reaction nor the role she was forced to play in court ceremony and in the cult of the images that had been reintroduced by Empress Irene and which Michael and herself had fought unsuccessfully to revert from the schollia at the University that the Caesar Bardas and Leo the mathematician had established at the Palace of The Maugnara.

Michael had been dead several years now, murdered by Basil who had usurped the power of the State after having maneuvered Michel, his friend and lover, into a corner, intrigued with the Iconodule faction of the Empire to make Michael look like an impious sybarite unfit to rule when in reality Michael had proven his worth at the head of his armies with his uncles Bardas and Petronas by his side. His great political mistake had been to let Basil murder the Caesar Bardas, who had been his mentor and chief adviser. He had believed Basil’s infamous accusations of treason against his uncle Bardas, his own blood, when it was Basil who was plotting to do away with any and all who stood in his way in his usurpation of supreme power.

She had loved Michael sincerely and had warned him against Basil but he was too far gone in the hands of Basil who used him sexually and pretended to be his friend all the time as he ably extracted concessions from him in exchange for his sexual favors; first as parakoimomenos, his companion, confidant and bodyguard, and after the murder of his uncle Bardas he had made Basil Caesar and finally, co-emperor so that after Michaels death he automatically became the ruling basileus.

And all this after she had given Michael a son, Leo, and was expecting his second son from him, Stephen; and had agreed to marry Basil so that he, Emperor of the Romans, Michael III of the Amorian Dynasty, could continue to see her in secret, because since he was already married to his repudiated wife Eudocia Decapolitissa, he could not legally marry her so he had given her away in marriage to his erstwhile friend and lover, Basil, the Macedonian stable groom and horse trainer.

When Basil ascended the throne she lived with him as his wife and Empress for sixteen years and had given him four children: Alexander, Anna, Helena and Maria. And now at the age of thirty-eight she had finally broken away.

She went to Briseis in the zylocastra of the forward deck. She had had special quarters built there where formerly the machine for the Greek fire was stored. She had a cabin installed there, richly furnished with Persian rugs and silk sleeping mats, low tables and a bronze brazier, washing and bathing area with a copper tub; all they needed that could be installed in a small, fast craft, ninety feet long, that had a crew of sixty rowers who doubled as warriors and mariners.

Briseis was nineteen years old, a personal gift from The Caliph Al-Ma’mun, handpicked by him from his harem, she came from Erithrea and was from a noble family in the lake region of Wanchi in the Highlands of Ethiopia. Eudocia Ingerina, Inga-Lena, had had her for four years, trained her and educated her, had fallen in love with her and been corresponded. Briseis was an acrobat, played the 20

lute, sang and wrote poetry, an incomparable dancer, with and without veils; she could swim and ride a horse like an Arab boy, she was extremely beautiful and charming as well; a marvel.

Nights they made love in a low whisper, in sweet rhythm, anticipating their wish, their eyes glowing in telepathic Tantra. During the day, they exercised on deck, helped trim the sails, and trained sword play with bamboo sticks with Simon Estilitzes and his young officers. In all this, they were loved by the crew who admired them and held them in awe because they were Monophisites and Master Sufis and this they understood because they were Mardaites from The Border Region of Cilicia and Lebanon.

At the end of the second week they were sailing up the western coast of Corfu approaching Cape Drastis on the North-Western edge of the island. No one had sighted them, the able seamanship of Captain Mavros and his picked crew had steered them into the islet by the huge white cliffs. They would sit there and await for The Lion of Tripoli, Rashiq al-Wardami.

And he came, towards the appointed time, in a fast galea, also. He jumped aboard, the legendary man, himself, to a standing company who saluted him in reverence. Eudocia Ingerina was there, in a white dress of white linen tied to her waist by a sky-blue sash over a rich damascene dagger.

She appeared radiant with her mane of blond hair with dark brown shades over her golden skin and her marvelous blue eyes as deep and clear as the sky that had entranced so many men: emirs, emperors and kings. They had both been slaves of Mulay Firduz al-Bardawi, Emir of Iskandariyya, both fourteen, the same age, fallen in love and been in love ever since.

Their trajectories had been different, she an Empress, he admiral of the Sultan’s Fleet, had met in secret several times, plotted to stay together. And now had come together never to separate for the rest of their lives… so they sailed together for Tripoli where Leo was the Emir.

Leo was a Levantine Greek of black hair, black eyes and a magnificent physique that honored his name. He became a Muslim early on in Alexandria and joined the Caliph’s Navy where he quickly rose through the ranks; he became qa’id, captain of a ship and then, amir al-bahr, admiral of a fleet.

He met the historian Mas’udi who mentions him in his works as one of the greatest navigators of his time.

But on this day he was sailing with his Lady, Ingalena of Kiev, towards Tripoli, his eagles nest. No sooner had they arrived than they went to his palace in the Abbasid Citadel and… plunged in a pool of clear, fresh running water inside a grotto that continued into a balcony that had a view of the City and its harbor. Here the three, for they were three, Ingalena, Briseis and Leo, felt free at last to expand themselves and reacquaint themselves intimately after an absence of some years, naked as they were, Leo noted the changes in these women, how they had grown stronger and more beautiful, if that were possible.

Perhaps, he reflected, the change in both woman was due to them having been liberated from the Court formality of Byzantium together with the exuberance of summer’s climate in Tripoli.

Swimming in that cool, transparent water, they looked at each other glowingly and came together in a trio of passionate embrace.

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Torchlight illuminated their way towards Leo’s private chambers, rooms that gave to the same terrace of hanging gardens adjacent to the pool. And there, on Leo’s palatial bed they laid and made love within a circle of tender caress, drinking the joy and the wonder of their eyes, in a circular movement that come and went from one to the other, caught in surprise.

In Tripoli, no one knew who these ladies were, except that they were the favorites of the Emir.

Rumor had it that one was Rus and the other Ethiopian. The fact was that Leo’s friends gathered in the Palace to meet them, Mas’udi came from Damascus and Damian from Tarsus. And there was a large formal gathering with music and dancing girls in the columned court of the Palace where Briseis made a stunning appearance and danced; from the first moment electrifying every one, imposing silence, shortening breath, all eyes following her.

Mas’sudi, filled with wonder, could not stop looking at the Empress Eudocia standing beside him with her eyes on the beauty of the visual poetry Briseis was making for them with her dance.

– Come, my friend, is this not wonderful that we find ourselves reunited in this happy occasion?

– Indeed, my Lady, I was thinking of our last meeting of not so long ago, and of your incomparable act of valor.

– A woman’s whim?

– I would not say that. It was a spiritual leap forward of great existential content, your flight from Constantinople.

– Coming from you, a tireless explorer, it is a great compliment.

– Many of us here in Islamiyya admire you deeply. I could arrange for you a meeting with The Caliph.

– It would have to be in secret. I am here incognito.

– Of course.

– I have already suggested to the Caliph that you might be of use as an ambassador to the Umayyad Court of Cordoba.

– And what did he say?

– He agreed on principle, but he wants to meet you in person.

– And what does Leon say?

– He is delighted with the idea. He says he will take you there himself.

– And what does the Caliph think?

– He says that a show of force there will help; so he is willing to send Leo with a fleet.

– Will this be an act of War? – No, because he will send a present.

– What present?

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– You. – Am I to become the Caliph’s wife?

– No, because Basil would find out, and the Caliph doesn’t want that.

– How did the Caliph know that I was in Islamiyya??

– He has spies.

– Are you a spy?

– In a way, yes. But I did not tell him, Leo did.

– When did he do that?

– Before leaving for Corfu. The Caliph likes Leo, he needs Leo. He is his best Admiral. The Caliph has an understanding with your son Leon. He is backing Leon in the struggle with his father. He knows Basil is not his father.

– Who told him that?

– Leo did.

– What Leo? – Your Leo. The Caliph is a wise man, he respects your longstanding relationship with Leo. He has known for many years. He gives you his blessing. He knows of your interest in The Sufi. He is of The Brotherhood himself.

The dance was coming to an end. The girl was exhausted. She lay prostrated on the floor, face dawn, panting, with her bare back exposed, wet in perspiration. She had given all and now she lay there.

The gathering exploded in applause. Many men salaamed, bowed in admiration. Two girls came to fetch her, to help her rise. She was covered in perspiration exuding a wonderful aroma that filled the hall. Her cheeks, red-hot, her magnificent pear-shaped breasts heaving, her magnificent black eyes, two hot embers. We all approached and touched her as was the costume, as a mark of honor and respect for a dancer who has shown duende, as the Andalusi say.

On our way to Damascus we stopped at Baalbek to admire the Temple of Jupiter, seat of so much discord not so long ago between Christians and Hellenizers during the reign of Emperor Julian. It now lay dormant conserving much of its glory which had been the joy of the Hellenists and the jealous envy of the Christians. Near-by we went to admire a gigantic monolith laying on its side that had been hewn from the local quarry. Mas’udi said this monolith had been intended for the platform beneath the Temple of Jupiter but could not be moved because of its huge size. The local Sheik believed that it had been quarried by djins and titans a very long time ago to form a platform for their chariots of fire. This started a discussion about the antiquity of the place seeing that the monoliths serving as a base under the Temple seemed much older and entirely out of proportion from an architectural point of view.

The Beqaa Valley surrounding Baalbek was very fertile, well-watered by streams from the AntiLebanon Range. Those wonderful stones had a long-lasting effect on us all: Muslim, Christian et all, 23

such is the effect of mystery, magic and time on the human soul because we are all here to share the same mysteries through our dreams which make us One with all mankind.

The local Sheiks had organized a banquet in our honor by the ruins of The Temple of Jupiter: roast boar, venison, tabuli, wines from Cyprus and other delights. The merry occasion lasted well into the night, we were entertained in torch light by minstrels and acrobats joined by Briseis; tumbling in the air and landing in the shoulders of Leo, to everyone’s delight. We slept in a luxurious tent, the three of us, sharing our embrace.

Next morning the cavalcade headed for Damascus were the Caliph Al-Ma’mun was then residing.

Damascus was a very old town, it was old even in Roman times. It had been the Capital of The Umayyad Caliphs before Baghdad became the Capital of the Abbasids. It had been somewhat forgotten and Al-Ma’mun wanted to restore it. We found The Caliph in the gardens of his palace by a large rectangular pool that reflected the dome of The Great Mosque of Damascus. He was surrounded by his friends, poets and Sufis conversing in a friendly manner. He was delighted to meet me and held my hands in his own shaking them gently for a long time, looking me in the eyes with an affectionate, gentle gaze. He was an old man who looked quite strong, tall and broad of shoulders with a long white beard that gave him a most noble and spiritual air.

We walked together alone in his garden, he explained to me that he wanted peace in the Mediterranean and that he knew of no better way to achieve this end than that the most experienced people living therein should get together and through personal contact reach an understanding. There had been great tension in the Islamic World ever since Abd ar-Rahman III had proclaimed himself Caliph in Cordoba. He asked for my help. He said that I was a recognized and respected figure in the Islamic World because of my sympathy for Sufism and my support for The House of Knowledge in Bagdad. And that because I was The Byzantine Empress he would listen to me as an impartial envoy.

I answered that I would be very glad to do that. That night we got together in his library, a very sumptuous building of marvelous wood work and corbelled roofs of exquisite mosaics inscribed with Coranic sentences bordered in lapis-lazuli resembling honeycombs. I gave him a beautiful copy of Plato’s Timaeus that I had brought from Constantinople especially for him, which was immediately placed on a table and admired by all his friends including Mas’udi who had known nothing about it.

Many evenings we spent in his library talking about Mediterranean Affairs and reading choice fragments of Sufi Philosophy and Poetry well into the night.

Great Masters began arriving, adding themselves to the company of this great Library known as The Maristan of Nur al-Din of Damascus: Jonaid, Tostari, Bistani, Mas’udi, al-Balkhi; and with them an order of darwish came to enjoin in the practice of the dhikr, the holy whirling practiced by Sufis revolving from right to left around the heart while whirling their opened arms; the right one directed to the sky, the left one is turned towards the earth; in his way, the devotee, the semazen, embraces all humanity with his love, receiving this beneficence from on High, where to, his right hand is pointed, as it passes through his left arm directed to the Earth. In the process of whirling, his ego is detached, while he becomes the conduit of Love and attains ecstasy.

I was invited to join this dance, which I did, it being a great honor; so overwhelmed was I by the company of these great men whom I held in such esteem and who beheld me with such Love that 24

little by little I began to forget myself and who I was and began to surrender my soul to The Most High and felt the benefice of His Love floating freely in space while whirling and whirling I became One with the World under the Dome of luminous muqarnas.

When it was over and I came to, I beheld all these friends and brothers, for such they were, with such gratitude and Love that I am sure that we all felt that our thoughts flowed freely from one to the other without uttering a single word; I realized why I was there and what my mission would be in my journey to Al-Andalus.

On our return to Tripoli we passed through Berytho, which some call Berutis, and travelled up the coast road enjoying many beaches where we saw mermaids sunning themselves on distant rocks from which they plunged to the sea when they saw us approaching. We had a clear view of one of them who waved back to us when we saluted her. Leo said he had often seen them in the Balearic Islands where they had an understanding with the natives who went naked year round on the Islands and did not bother the mermaids so we decided to swim naked so as to attract them to us and they did come near us. They specially liked Briseis and wanted to take her but she resisted. Briseis said that she played with them underwater, that they were beautiful and had a membrane between the fingers of their hands and that they had little spears they used to hunt fish and that they emitted a beautiful sound that was their language. We admired the way they swam underwater undulating their bodies like dolphins; indeed, we saw them in the company of dolphins as if they had an understanding with them. Briseis said she saw a dolphin talking to a mermaid underwater.

We had a covered wagon that was quite handsome, I had seen nothing like it in Constantinople, it had spoke wheels and the carriage was suspended by chains from the axel. It had a leather roof and doors; inside it was quite comfortable with Persian rugs and a damask divan. Leo designed it himself and had it made in Tripoli. It was harnessed to four stallions and it made a comfortable ride. We three rode in it and ate dates, apricots, salted almonds and pistachios and drank wine.

Leo had risen from the ranks in the armies of Yazman al-khadin a famous Emir of Tarsus (882-891), a courageous champion of Islam respected by the Byzantines for his valor during the wars at the shifting borders of the Empires. He told us this while we rode in his wagon. He was to meet his friend Damian, who had also been a Captain under Yazman, at Tarsus where they were going to organize two fleets and then cross The Mediterranean all the way to Valencia and the Balearics. We were to go with them in a party of ambassadors headed by myself, Mas’udi and Abu Zayd al-Balkhi to the Court of Abd’el Rahman III, The Caliph of Cordoba.

I had noticed that after the Sufi dhikir Leo beheld me with certain awe and admiration, he was very gentle and affectionate with me but did not dare make love to me like we used to. Something had changed in our relationship and he seemed to have drawn nearer to Briseis and this was confirmed on our return to the Palace at Tripoli where I saw them the first night after we arrived swimming naked by torchlight in the pool laughing and making love. I did not feel any jealousy but was very glad for them since I had been worried for the future of Briseis whom I loved as if she were my own daughter and I could see that they were becoming very attached to one another.

Leo and Damian got together 160 dromons, or adrumunum as the Arabs called them, biremes and galeai split in two fleets that were going to ‘show the colors’ in the Western Mediterranean which was at the time ‘an Arab lake’. They planned on visiting Malta and Sicily along the way. We had 25

heard that before The Deluge the Titans, who were a race of giants, had built imposing temples in the Island of Malta and we wanted to see them.

We set sail in spring after Damian, who had gone to the Island of Crete, on an errand to help the Andalusi pirates who had established themselves in Candia and where resisting the Byzantines who wanted to reconquer the Island. We were to wait for him in Palermo towards the end of May. Estilitzes Mavros was with us with a company of picked Mardaites aboard a large dromon that carried the party of ambassadors and which was, in effect, the admiral’s flagship.

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It was a sight to see more than sixty ships sailing in Unisom on the open sea; the galleasses with their lateen sails sailing briskly leaning on the wind with their prows knifing the waves, rising and falling, venting showers of spray; the sturdier dromons with their double rows of rowers, the second man standing, pulling hard, the long decks jutting forward on the angry seas, cutting the sea with elegance and power, the men leaning hard on the oars with the muscles of their backs bulging, following the beat of the drums with the quarter-masters passing the decks with their hand behind their backs blowing their whistles, sun burnt, hard driving mariners, and us on the forecastle where the ballistae stood ready for action.

No one expected the fleets of the Byzantine Empire because they had retreated North of Crete.

Nonetheless, the men were ready for action as Admiral Himerios was a doughty fellow and no one knew what he was about or from where he would spring. Leo thought highly of him and respected him. He was capable of surprising the fleet while at anchor in Tarsus and burn it with Greek Fire.

We could not relax until we were half way to Malta and even then a Byzantine fleet could appear out of Bari or Syracuse.

Briseis and I were dressed as men, I had insisted. Briseis could climb to the top of a mast and swing dawn on a yard like any sailor. We regularly trained with swords and archery and the men considered us one of the company, especially our Mardaites who were loyal to us and were from Leo’s home district of Cilicia. I had always kept myself fit being from Viking stock, it was a sign of our personal freedom, especially for women, besides, I liked the exercise; being fit made me look more beautiful.

We discussed this with Abu Zayd al-Balkhi, he had been a disciple of Al-Kindi and was himself known all over the Mediterranean in Learned circles for his many contributions to Science, Theology and philosophy, Medicine and Psychology. He talked a lot about the relationship of the Soul to health and how many illnesses had their origin in the mind. He taught ‘mental hygiene’ as well as Ethics and Theology. He believed in ishtibak, the interweaving or entangling of the soul and body. He classified Neurosis into four emotional disorders: fear and anxiety, anger and aggression, sadness and depression and obsession. He noted that the healthy individual should always keep healthy thoughts and feelings in his mind. ‘He stated that a balance between mind and body is required for good health and that an imbalance between the two can cause illnesses’. He talked a lot about diet because in Balkh he had come into contact with Buddhist monks who had studied in India at a great University in the City of Nalanda. He himself was one of the leading lights in The House of Wisdom in Baghdad and I had corresponded with him for many years.

Eventually we came into the great port of Melite in Malta were the whole fleet could fit comfortably.

A few galleasses were detached to keep guard over the entrance and beyond, in case the Byzantines dared any surprise attacks. Only a few years back Halaf al-Hadin had devastated the Island and expelled the Byzantines leaving few buildings standing, so the country looked desolate except for a few inhabited farms in the interior.

A party of us went to Tarxien to look at the Ruins of The Temple of The Giants, ‘Ggantija’, as the natives call them. When we got there we were absolutely overwhelmed by the antiquity of the place. Mas’udi and Abu Zayd said that they had never seen anything like it and they had been all over The World. They said that clearly many thousands of years had elapsed from their construction and that this had had to have taken place before The Great Deluge as it was known from the Ancient 27

Egyptians and Babylonians that a race of giants had existed before The Deluge. Mas’udi who knew a lot about architecture and construction techniques said that the buildings were aligned towards stellar constellations and that they were in a sense astronomical observatories and this was confirmed by Abu Zayd who like Mas’udi was also a renowned Astronomer.

Next, we went to Hal-Saflieni, a subterranean structure discovered by Greeks of Syracuse on the advice of a local shepherd boy many centuries ago. It was a magnificent sanctuary of unparalleled and mysterious acoustics that had been a repository of most ancient remains of a race of men with elongated skulls that were thought to be the sons of the Titans with common women. No one had dared remove these bones and they had remained there since remotest antiquity. On the advice of Mas’udi and Abu Sayd, Leo had an iron gate installed at the entrance to safe guard such momentous relics and appointed the local naval commander to their safekeeping.

The next day we left for Palermo where we arrived after a few days inspection of the Western coast of Sicily through a passage in the Aegadean Islands. We found a graceful town which had the makings of a city, surrounded by a natural amphitheater of mountains with a beautiful bay adorned with clusters of palm trees. A permanent stream of water from four springs runs through the town adorned by charming piazzas and bazars set along wide and straight streets. New mosques going up: all was bustle, with an air of hope and of future invention. I began to cultivate a spirit of detachment in admiration of Islamic civilization. I still slept with Briseis and shared her with Leo. And yet I spent more and more time with Mas’udi and Abu Sayd enjoying our conversations on the most varied topics imaginable.

By the middle of June Damian appeared with his fleet off the Port of Palermo. He had had to disperse a Byzantine fleet that was besieging Candia in Crete. With his men and Leo’s men on shore the population of Palermo nearly doubled and supplies had to be brought in from the interior of the country which fortunately was very rich and well provided thanks to the various new crops introduced by the Arabs and the new systems of irrigation. The economy of Sicily as a whole was booming; sugar cane, oranges, lemons, pistachios and livestock thrived within a new system of small land holdings that was enlivening the local markets and eroding the monopolies of the ancient latifundia. And this was reflected in the local population which had become quite cosmopolitan with Norsemen, Slav and Circassian mercenaries, Moorish merchants from Corduva, Alexandria and Carthage, along with hundreds of men, women, girls and boys that were daily being sold in the markets; brought in from all over the Western Mediterranean, the product of raids on the Christian lands beyond, they had come to augment the population of Sicily.

By the end of June we sailed towards Medina Mayurqa. In a few days Damian and his fleet would sail to Valencia and then to Al-mariyya to announce our coming. Our fleet anchored in the beautiful Bay of Mayurqa were we were well received by the Emir. Our dromon detached itself since we wanted to explore the Island of Formentera. We laid Anker by the sand bar of Empalmador islet since we had heard that the nearby sea lagoon was visited by schools of Mermaids at this time of year and that the local population swam with them in the nude.

Sure enough, when we arrived towards sunset, there were dozens of Mermaids swimming with the local youths in the lagoon. Briseis was surprised to meet her friend from the beach near Tripoli, it was nothing for a mermaid to swim the whole length of The Mediterranean, and now this Mermaid was inviting Briseis to a secret cove where there was an altar to the Godess Tanit from Carthaginian 28

times. We went there in a group, swimming naked, each taken by the hands by two mermaids, part swimming under water and part on the surface.

We had to swim under water to enter the grotto but once inside we were surprised to see how spacious it was, well lit by a shaft coming from above. Poised on a rock, the image of the Goddess Tanit in the form of a mermaid. We were delighted, the mermaids brought us fresh oysters and live clams to eat with them, and these they pried open with their little spears. We thought ourselves lucky to be living such a wonderful experience.

As the sun went down we were taken back to the lagoon and we exchanged gifts under the light of the full moon. I gave the Queen of the Mermaids my own necklace of gold that had a large emerald pendant and she gave us beautiful trees of red coral. Before we left she wrote in Greek on the wet sand, the word: Constantinople.

That morning we sailed to Al-mariyya, in South-Western Hispania, where we arrived a few days later and started our procession to Corduva. Corduva with its famous libraries and universities, hundreds of mosques, bazars, fountains, public baths and gardens by the river Guadalquevir was the rival of Constantinople. The Medina-Azahara, the palace complex of The Caliph was a city on to itself, a crown jewel in the pendant of achievements of the Magnificent Caliph, Abd ar- Rahman III. We came into the City through the Roman Bridge over the Guadalquivir, ridding on beautiful stallions. Cheered by the populace who came out to see the Empress of Byzantium because now that Basil was dead, my son Leo had become the new Basileus and I was no longer incognito, so the people cheered on, the Caliph rode beside us.

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Our presence in the City caused a stir all over Al-Andalus, learned men from as far away as The translators School of Toledo came to meet Abu al-Hasan Ali ibn al-Husayn al-Mas’udi and Abu Zayd Ahmed ibn Sahi al Balkhi.

Abd ar-Rahman was a very handsome man of fifty, his mother had been a Spanish captive, a slave from the Basque country of Pampelona and his father, Muhammad ibn Abdullah had been the son of the Emir Abd Allah, ruler of Al-Andalus. The Caliph was blond and blue eyed like me, although quite sunburnt, like me. We were seated on a marble bench by the pool of a splendid court of double pillared mudejar arches in his palace, on the highest ground of a gently sloping hill overlooking the river Guadalquivir. It was evening, and the sun was going dawn; the orange-gold tint of the sun was bathing the distant trees of the gently sloping gardens in radiant light that lent them a mystery that was at once poetical and nostalgic, a saudade, which is the mood of Al-Andalus… so was the orangegold glow of the sun bathing my dress of the purest white transparent silk from Sinan, revealing my naked body, as established protocol demanded, and so was the Caliph attired in a similar garb, as protocol demanded, with his long scimitar unleashed, erect, and vibrant, expecting entry, refuge solace; which he obtained, as demanded by protocol, as I leaned forward and grabbed him by the hilt, introducing the scepter in my mouth…

Later on, in his Harem, a procession of beautiful youths, boys and girls, all naked, exemplified for us a variety of postures, inspired by exquisite watercolors in the Persian style which they showed, the form of love they wanted to dramatize for us. One of the boys came alone, naked, the loveliest creature that you could imagine, strikingly beautiful, his eyes enhanced with Koll, his body powdered in white, his breast heaving, his black eyes flaming, arrogant, passionate, defeated... he danced for us with outstanding command and elegance. At the end of which he collapsed in front of The Caliph sobbing. The Sultan told me his story.

He was a Spanish boy named Pelagius, the Caliph had taken him from his family after the siege of Coimbra. He was at the time I met him thirteen years old, beautiful, very delicately made, rather thin, with a lovely mouth of full feminine lips that would have been the envy of any girl. He had resisted the Caliph’s advances for a while until he had been spanked by the Caliph himself and obtained an erection from the boy. From then on it had been easy to get his consent and tearfully he had accepted the Caliphs passionate kisses for he was very much taken by him.

It seems that he came from a very Christian family who expected him to become a martyr rather than submit to the Caliph’s wishes, and what most outraged the Bishop of Coimbra was that the boy willingly, had become a Moslem. So they put out the version that the boy had been tortured and killed and the Pope in Rome declared him a saint as an example for all Christian youth. This had become another incident in the cultural war between Islam and Christianity, ‘for the soul of the Iberian Peninsula’.

Later on, when we had become friends (we were already lovers), the Caliph and I discussed this matter with Mas’udi and Abu Zayd who was a great psychologist. We came to the conclusion that in captivity, it was common for a slave to fall in love with his master; not necessarily, and only, as a means of survival but because the relationship had an erotic substratum that sometimes brought to the fore the desire of love. I had been a slave who fell in love with her master, Michael, and had given him two children: Leon and Stephen. With Basil it had been different, we were both ‘slaves’, dependent on Michael’s wishes; besides, I did not love Basil; he lacked finesse and he sometimes 30

beat me, made love to me against my will and used violence, physical and psychological, something that Michel never did. Besides, Basil had castrated my son Stephen, and regularly beat my son Leo, something I could never forgive.

The Caliph agreed, he said that his own mother had been a Christian slave taken in the Basque Country and that his one true love, his concubine Azahara, for whom The Medina Azahara had been named, the mother of his son and heir, Al-Hakkhem, had been his own slave and childhood companion. Everyone knew that my relationship with Briseis was one of intense, spontaneous love that cut both ways, everyone could feel the loving tension between us. It was a known fact. No one thought of Briseis as ‘my slave’; and it was admired that I did not show any jealousy when she became Leon’s wife, he who had been ‘my one true love’ for the past twenty-six years.

So, we friends, discussed the nature of love for endless hours as we promenaded in the Caliphal Gardens of the Medina Azahara or rode in the fair country around Cordoba near the foothills of The Sierra Morena. Only the Poets can truly comprehend the tremors of the heart and I quote our friend Abu-l-Hasan Ali ben Hisn, a poet of Al-Andalus, who accompanied us on our excursions:

Nothing altered me more than the song of a pigeon That sang, perched on a branch, between the River And its bank.

Its neck of burnt bronze, its breast lapizlazuli, Solar orange its head, its back was chestnut as were the points of its feathers.

The Rubi of his pupils he shifted over eyelids of pearl With a line of gold bordering the eyelid

Black was the sharp point of its beak as The silver point of a quill dipped in ink,

He laid on a branch of arak as if on a throne Hiding his gorge under a wing.

Yet as he saw my tears flowing, It took fright from my lament 31

And, rising over the green branch,

Spread its wings, and flapped them in its flight Taking my heart with him. Where? I do not know.

Portico in the Medina Azahara

He had stayed behind while riding along the margins of The Guadalkebir, wrote this poem on his pad and then read it to us. The Caliph Abd-el Rahman gave him one of his rings, with a beautiful Rubi, right there, by the banks of the river.

(My translation from El Divan de al-Mutamid, El PichĂłn, Poemas Arabigoandaluces, Emilio Garcia Gomez, Espasa Calpe, 1940).

We laid together the Caliph and I on his divan overlooking the balcony of his Park. We had become friends and lovers with no attachments, yet in great affection and mutual understanding. I had fulfilled my pact with The Caliph of Baghdad and delivered his message which was one of Love and Harmony within the borders of Islam, Islamiyya, which reached from the shores of The Atlantic to the Taklamakhan and the border with Sinan. In return both Caliphs had agreed to keep the Peace with Byzantium for Thirty Years.

My Embassy fulfilled, I started thinking of paying a visit to my family in Constantinople and then proceeding to Central Asia with Abu Zayd al-Balkhi. I had a letter from the Caliph of Baghdad with his zeal and one of his rings to prove it; besides I was going to travel with Abu Zayd who was well known from Damascus to Samarkand. Our friend Mas’udi would stay in Corduba where he had been 32

invited to teach at the libraries and the Madrasas. Briseis was with Leo’s child; and Leo…. had a long career of piracy ahead of him… So I gave them my blessing and after a long walk in the Park of The Medina Azhahara we said good-bye and I took my leave from The Caliph after much feasting and love-making.

Captain Estilitzes Mavros was ready for me at the harbor of Al-mariyya, we were to sail to Byzantium in his galea and Abu Zayd was coming with us. My body longed for Briseis but my soul was transported to the deserts of Central Asia where I knew the Buddhist Monasteries of Samarkand, Balkh and The Taklamakan were waiting for me. We made a stop at Palermo to replenish and continued on our journey to Buyukada Island on the Sea of Marmora near Constantinople where I had a house with a private wharf. Basil had been dead for some time now and from there it was easy to send word to my son Leo, the new basileus.

We entered the Sea of Marmora in June 887, four years and seven months after we had left.

We approached Buyukada Island at night, the last stretch of the way rowing. The pinaza of the ship was lowered and we made our good-byes to the company, each of the men came forward and I distributed a gold Solidus with my portrait on one of its sides; and for Estilitzes a special coffer with my thanks and my embrace. Six men rowed us to the wharf clearly outlined by moonlight. The men helped us unload our chests and coffers and carried them inside the house. I summoned my trusted guardians and keepers from their sleeping chambers and they were much surprised and at first could hardly recognize me. Our suites were readied and we retired for the rest of the night.

Solidus of Eudocia Ingerina

The following morning, Abu Zayd was delighted with the view from the hanging terrace over the cliff and the sea below breaking on the rocks. We sat at a table to take our morning repast. Our house had been the Palace of Emperor Justin II, refurbished and redecorated by me several years before.

It was now in disrepair but serviceable. No news of our arrival was to filter until I had heard from my son Leo. Accordingly, I sent a trusted servant to warn him through the proper channels.

That very evening Leo arrived incognito. I knew that he much enjoyed doing this because it relaxed him from the strain of Court Protocol which he knew so well and was to write a book about it in the future. Our meeting was indescribable for joy, we embraced for a long time, Abu Zayd being a silent, smiling witness. I introduced him to Leo as my companion in a multitude of adventures. Leo, who

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was a very learned man himself, already knew Zayd by reputation since he had read some of his books and was thrilled to meet him.

Leo and I had kept in touch through couriers over the years but he wanted to know all the details of my voyage. He told me about Basil’s last days; how his belt had been caught in the antlers of a large bull deer while ridding hard in the chase and had been dragged over rugged terrain in a hunting accident and had survived for a few days until he finally passed away. He was over seventy years old and it was a marvel how long he survived his accident and it was rumored that someone had helped him on his way.

Leo told me how after his coronation he had solemnly had his real father Michael III’s remains reburied in the Church of The Holy Apostles and how he had recalled his sisters from the Convent of Saint Euphenia in Petron. I had had a total of six children all of whom were still alive. And they were all coming to me in Buyukada Island, except for Alexander who was not reliable because he was a ‘lazy, lecherous, drunk and a malignant fellow’.

Stephen, Anna, Helena and Maria did come and were overjoyed to meet their mother whom they thought was dead. Leo was 21 years old, Stephen 20, Anna 15, Helena 14 and Maria 12. They would spend three months with their mother in Buyukada Island. They could not convince her to stay any longer. She had had enough with being Empress of Byzantium. But she did grant them a few forays into The City… incognito.

We discussed what we would do and we decided we would go to the theater. Leo had recently commissioned a representation Lysistrata by Aristophanes at the Pandidacterion, the amphitheater at the University of the Magnaura. I went dressed as an Arab woman with a veil, escorted by Zayd and we posed as recently arrived ambassadors from The Caliph Mamoun which in a way we were.

We left one evening, in the Royal Barge, and entered The City, The Queen of Cities, Constantinople, through the Royal Docks in front of The Sacred Imperial Palace. We crossed the Palace in a group and entered The Magnaura through the Chalké Gate to the Amphitheater of The University to the special box of the Emperor and his family. In a back seat no one noticed my presence as one more of the invited guests, an Arab woman behind a veil. I enjoyed Lysistrata, I liked the irony of Greek women denying sex to their husbands as a means to ending war which was what I had been doing myself the length of The Mediterranean; except that I did use sex to further my ends. After the representation was over we went dawn the Mesé to the Palace of Andronicus Ducas to have dinner.

The Ducas were an old family, friends and supporters of the Amorian and Macedonian Dynasties, which we had known for many years. Irene Ducaiana had been my best friend. She did not recognize me at first until, in conversation, I mentioned several intimate details of our lives and she went pale when I revealed myself by a fountain in her private gardens when we were alone, she thought that I had been dead, we embraced and kissed passionately because we had been lovers. She thought I had been dead and now I was a revenant with an Arab identity. She wanted to know everything.

I invited her to come to Buyucada Island and stay with me if she were to keep the secret.

She came and I took her to swim at my private beach and there alone we made love recognizing the girls we had been when at fifteen or sixteen we had found solace in each other’s arms so pressed had we been by the difficulties of or lives then as members of the Court surrounded by the intrigues 34

that we were too young to comprehend we found in our bodies solace and caress, in the confidences that we then made, we had shared our intimacy.

So that day as we tasted the salt of our bodies from the sea in that cove, in my private cove, I told her of my plans to go to Central Asia, to Balkh, Samarkand and Bokhara. As we had done in our youth, sharing our dreams and our embrace. It felt good. But she betrayed me out of jealousy of the freedom I had gained and went about saying in the aristocratic circles of Constantinople that there was an Arab woman claiming to be the former Empress Eudocia Ingerina, pretending ascendancy over the Emperor Leo, The Wise.

This event anticipated our departure from Constantinople even though Leo had Irene Ducaiana vanished to a monastery on the Island of Therebyntos. I did not want to precipitate a political crisis by remaining any longer within the borders of the Byzantine Empire. We left for Trebizond on the fourth of October 887 after having spent nearly four months in Constantinople, I said good-bye to my children never to see them again.

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Our journey to Trebizond along the coast of the Euxine was for me a profound spiritual experience in which I finally detached myself from my previous existence as the Empress of Byzantium and became a new person devoid of any sense of importance or social identity. I now accepted myself for whom I had always been, no longer a Russian girl, or an Arab slave or a Byzantine Empress but a soul full of compassion and love for the World, love for myself‌ and in this my companion Abu Zayd had been a great help to me. He had held up a prism for me, The Great Jewel of Discrimination, The Diamond Sutra that had helped me see the multiple Faces of Being, The Elemental Unity within Diversity that transforms grief and loss into Universal Love and Compassion for All. After this Periplus through The Euxine Sea we came to the City of Trebizond where our journey really began. And a very pleasant port-city it is with a rich market filled with all the products of Asia that find their way there because it is the terminus and portal of the many roads that connect it to the interior of Asia, to the Valley of The Euphrates, Armenia and Fergana; the Silk Road along the cities of the Amu-Darya and the Taklamakan. So we proposed to go to Erzurum and then over the Zigana Pass to Lake Sevan in Armenia; from there to Baki-Suraxani in the Caspian Sea, take ship to BabelSari in Persia and proceed to Rashhad in Khurasan and from there to the city of Merv where the Caliph al-Ma’mun was then residing. Merv had the greatest market in Khurasan and was a great center of learning with many Buddhists, Manicheans and Zoroastrians living side by side with Nestorian Christians and the followers of Islam.

After a brief stay with the Caliph (if this were possible!), we had wanted to go to Bokhara, Samarkand and Balkh, the hometown of my companion Abu Zayd al-Balkhi, where he would like to visit his family. From there on, God willing, In sha Allah, we planned to visit Kashgar and Turpan in the Tarim Basin of The Taklamakan and then go to the Thousand Buddha Caves of Bezeklik.

We had gone from Samarqand to Fergana and from Fergana To Kashgar and from there to Turpan near the ancient ruins of Gaochang in the Mutou Valley and there in a gorge, in The Flaming Mountains, we found the Caves of The Thousand Buddhas in Sinan, where The Adobe of The Blessed Buddha Amintabha resides.

The monks there greeted us as brethren and with them we rested for many months and received the infinite blessings of their spiritual embrace and there found solace for our souls inside the peaceful grottoes; relief and comfort in the new knowledge gained of ourselves and the real nature of spiritual life, as we learned to translate from the ancient Greek of The Sogdian Bactrians the Teachings of The Dhammapada, the loving words of The Buddha Himself. Merchants of The Silk Road have over the years contributed generously to the Lamasery of Bezeklik. Many of the paintings in the Grottoes depicting pilgrims and patrons from Sogdiana and Sinan were donated by them and in return the Lamas provide hospitality and nourishment at the local caravanserai adjacent to the lamasery.

This was our plan then which we fulfilled not without a few struggles and hardships and which took us well over three year before we decided to settle in Samarqand which we loved best and found most agreeable to our taste. On both banks of the Amu-Darya the trees and greenery of the fields and orchards extend as far as the eye can see. On the City itself the parks and building make a lovely ensemble; the avenues are wide and clean, there is plenty of water everywhere in canals and fountains and the people are even tempered, cultured and friendly, of a generous and hospitable disposition.

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Zayd and I found a beautiful house with a garden and orchard with many fruit trees, figs, apricots, nuts and date palms, watered by ingenious canals that are the delight of our evenings as we tend them ourselves. We have many friends that come to our house in the beautiful evenings of Samarqand, and tell us of their journeys, we read poetry, play instruments and sing. We write in the new ‘paper’ recently invented by artisans of Sinan who have a shop in the City, We translate books that we brought from Bezeklik. I have myself translated the Diamond Sutra from the original Bactrian Greek to Arabic and have had it Printed in this new ‘paper’, which we think will simplify reading, and all in all, constitute a great carrier of knowledge. We plan to print more manuscripts, Zayd and I, all we can of the beautiful texts we brought from the Taklamakan…

The Diamond Sutra, oldest printed book in the World, dated 11 May, 868

37

THE FIRE THAT CAME

Nacimiento del volcán Paricutín, Gerardo Murillo dit. Dr. Atl.

Para Consuelo

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The ferns and moss were covered with dew, the sun shot wide beams of light across the forest, deflected by the trunks of the pine trees into the rising mist. A man appeared from among the trees his dark eyes glinting, the naked muscles taut, arms tensed bending the bow, pointing the arrow.

The deer jumped and was gone over the rock outcrops. The man followed through, arms taut ready to lift the bow again. Standing on the outcrop of rock he waited for the mist to lift; it rose plumed like a bird aided by the wind and disappeared towards a valley below stretching far from the mountain.

The unexpected sight appearing out of the humid earth below extended far and wide. To the east two mighty mountains stood white and beautiful.

One was a massive cone the other had the figure of a sleeping woman.

To the west before him threatening to overwhelm him a sea of pine rose to a height that resembled an eagle’s beak. And in front of him lay a sparkling lake silver and blue under the sun, like a young sea loosing itself over the curvature of the earth.

The man stood surprised, his brown muscles wet with perspiration and dew. He breathed the cool air streaming over boulders and trees, spilling in to the valley below. A lone eagle circled the sky with a serpent dangling from its claws. He determined to follow the eagle into the valley below.

He moved lightly with amazing speed choosing well his ground running among the trees with the grace of a deer. So excited he was at the prospect of this new

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discovery that he seemed to glide over shrub and grass through narrow glens descending always towards the valley and the lake.

Deep into the valley he ran, jumping over shrubbery like an ancient steeple-chase runner, and out of thick forests he came suddenly upon a maize field. So startled was he that he barely had time to hide among the 39

stalks before a group of armed warriors bore furiously upon him coming from all sides. He was dragged violently and tied to a post where upon a fierce looking young man started to make deep cuts into his breast with an obsidian knife; and would have continued to do so if it had not been for the timely arrival of a powerful personage broad of shoulder and high of stature who seemed to be the princeps inter pares. Upon a sign he was immediately released and spoken to by this chief in a language that he did not understand.

Prolonged speech was a wonder to him, for he a simple hunter, was accustomed to short enunciations bidding this or acknowledging that.

So he was much impressed by the perorations of this chief and the quantity of men that seemed to heed his speech. Where he came from, a hunter in a hunters tribe, nobody got around to do much talking unless they stumbled upon the sacred weeds or mushrooms or cactuses. Then they would sit at night around a fire eat of the food of The Spirit and sing their own song, after dancing around the fire until overcome with exhaustion.

The princeps pulled him by the hair and threw him to the ground placing A foot over his chest and driving the tip of a spear a little way into his throat to signify submission. As this chief continued his oration for the benefit of his followers and for the preservation and the prestige of his power the ground began to heave and tremble with overwhelming violence.

A mighty roar as if of great thunder come from within the center of the earth And far off, a gigantic explosion was heard. All stood immobile ambushed

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by terror with an invisible noose around their necks, their hearts frozen.

The earth heaved with extreme violence renting the cornfield, throwing earth, stalks and corn into the air creating huge fissures in the ground that would open in an instant and close in another swallowing men earth and 40

plants alike. The powerful public speaker and prince forgot the functions, objects and props of his power and ran away terrified to seek cover. The hunter remained on the ground covered with earth and uprooted plants among the debris of society and the tears of the social contract.

The shaking continued and it was terrible but the hunter was not afraid, he had witnessed before the anger of the earth. The hunter stood up, enormous balls of fire appeared on the sky tumbling violently until they crashed among the trees in great explosions sending smashed trunks and branches high into the air where they were lost amidst a tumult of fire and acrid smoke. Fire was raining from the sky setting fire to the earth bellow.

Looking up the hunter saw a mountain on fire, one that had just grown like a purulent scar around an open wound from where poured hot molten lava in great surges of incandescent ooze. A very large cloud of sulfurous ash began to climb towards the heavens obscuring the sun. In the darkness that prevailed the earth trembled and the great roar of the mountain created a tumult of fire and terror.

The hunter ran away from the mountain towards the lake. The continuous blast from that furnace created a considerable heat wave; the descending ash burned the skin and blinded the eyes. Stumbling now and then the hunter continued to run away from the burning forest and the deafening crash of the balls of fire. The air grew denser and hot, freighted with ash and sulfur. It was almost impossible to

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breath. The hunter arrived in sight of some deserted houses built on earthen platforms, they were burning already and there was no one in sight.

He paused by one of the houses and saw a pot full of beans on a fire.

He fell on them with all the savage energy of one whose mind is exhausted for the day – perhaps for many a day to come. A calabash gourd contained 41

fresh water and he stanched his thirst. Smoke was floating in through the woven reed work of the wall. The hunter stepped into the terrace surrounding the house and beheld something that chilled his heart, great walls of lava were descending dawn the mountain side iridescent, incandescent, glowing red, orange and purple, deep purple, the hottest of the hot, devouring shrub and forest alike, scorching the earth, setting houses on fire, encircling and burying stone buildings, consuming asphyxiated human flesh, restoring balance to nature, ashes to ashes, the invigorating prima facie material of life, setting forth on a new course, a new beginning.

The hunter ran dawn an avenue leading to the great round pyramid. There on the top a group of terrified priests were sodomizing youths and tearing out the hearts of young girls on a last orgy before the end of their office and opportunity for social advancement came. The hunter stood for a moment listening to the lugubrious cries, seeing the mad flight of torn human skins waving around the necks of the guardians of society gone amok amidst the splendid fire of a young volcano. The dying city giving a last hoarse cry before the end came.

A sea of fire was approaching the citadel of the gods; some had already ran away others would not easily relinquish their place in Parnassus.

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The hunter saw at last the shoreline of the lake. It was no longer a sparkling young sea of silver and blue but a vast pool of blood reflecting the fire that came. Trapped between the volcano and the lake, between fire and water, thousands of people crowded the shores of the lake. There did not seem to be enough crafts to go around. Long stone jetties topped with beaten earth held struggling multitudes hurriedly departing, some fought for a place on a boat others had already drowned, an old man defended his family with a paddle, the boat overturned, the hunter saw a young woman with a baby emerge from 42

the crimson waters of the lake amidst a mass of desperate humanity. He plunged into the water, swam the length with vigorous strokes until he reached the woman and the child and held them above the water. Out of the water the prodigal lake had brought forth a woman for the hunter. The Earth, sometimes bountiful, sometimes irascible, withholds, takes away, unfathomable in her temper; now striking without warning filling all creation with terror, sometimes generous and smiling she gives of her fruit.

Explosions and commotion, huge balls of fire, molten lava fell in deafening concussions on the waters of the lake where the hot steam of vaporized water caused fearful burns on peoples’ skins and threw up a multitude of dead fish stunned, inflated.

Several boats had managed to paddle away a fair distance towards the northern shore. There safety lay. The hunter reached the shore carrying the woman and the child in his strong arms. The grateful creatures embraced his legs. The hunter beckoned her to follow him and they went bordering the lake along a narrow path into a forest where even the trees seemed to be full of ominous apprehension. Presently they came upon a group of burning houses

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Several charred corpses lay in a wide courtyard, the smell of burnt flesh and burnt pine mingled with the howling of stray dogs. Clouds of sulfurous ash and flying sparks burned the skin making it impossible to remain on land.

There were several empty canoes tied to a post in the shallows of the lake in front of the houses. The hunter took the woman and the child over to a swift looking craft and none too soon climbed in. They paddled furiously towards the center of the lake as the deafening roar of the mountain rent the air with new excretions of lava.

Several hour later and totally exhausted they had reached the opposite shore 43

of the lake where they now sat in silence contemplating the burning mountain disgorge fate to nature and humankind alike. Some enterprising ladies had set up stalls and were selling tlacoyos and hot tamales, others were bartering whatever they had salvaged from their past lives. A new settlement was going up on the lea of the land on the far side of the lake from where the proud city had stood. And it would be a long time before the mountain quieted dawn and the hunter left his new house with his young wife already in the family way and holding his adopted son take to their canoe again to cross the lake and explore what had once been the mightiest city-state on the lake.

As they approached the southern shore they saw an immense lava field some eighty square miles climbing all the way to the mountain they knew as ‘the eagles beak´. Thousands of burnt tree stumps stood towards the outer edges of the lava field. On the lava fi there was nothing save pools of rain water that had collected on the depressions and air bubbles. The silence of The Earth had returned over what had been an immense flood of liquid silicon that now looked like hot molten chocolate.

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THE EIGHTY YEAR OLD MEXICAN PEASANT WOMAN WHO WENT TO OXFORD

Evelyn Lynton with one of the twins in the background

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A swollen sensation of pain in my knees and the light of day urged me to awake, to stretch my legs and walk about. My esteemed friend laid fast asleep in his hammock, enterprising fellow that he is, he had preferred to sleep in the open. Whereas I had slept inside the car and now my legs were stiff and painful so that I walked with difficulty around the parking area at Uxmal. The ancient city of Uxmal, in The Mayab, now an archeological site, handsomely reconstructed by the INAH. It was then that I saw Elvira sitting on the stone steps that led to the site’s reception area. She was selling oranges, an unexpected an improbable figure at that early hour, a Mayan woman some sixty years old in an impeccable white linen dress embroidered with bright flowers. She had the natural dignity and grace associated with the finer spirits of that race and a certain humility, not the humility of the humble, although humble she did seem, but the humility of the strong in spirit that gives a certain beauty in truth to those who hold no illusions from history but are the inheritors of strong currents that come from the depths of pre-history.

She had arranged her oranges in neat pyramidal piles set in a row on a white piece of cloth. I bought two pyramids, one for myself and one for my esteemed friend still laying fast asleep on his hammock.

‘Mon estimé’, ‘mi estimado’, ‘my esteemed friend’, as we called each other, was a displaced person, an Argentinian architect stranded in Mexico at the time, a victim of the obtuse obduracy of the Chilean military who had overthrown Salvador Allende in whose government he had been working building houses for a community living in the hills outside Santiago. So, he being such a fine fellow, I woke him up and gave him an orange.

We had come late the previous evening from a town in Tabasco where we had been regaled with the idyllic sight of a pleasant town living the innocent infancy of a planned community complete with a picturesque plaza. The jolly inhabitants had been strolling around a kiosk with a fountain illuminated by many colored lights arranged in a spiral fashion; the town’s people enjoying the fresh air of the night, eating ice cream, the children riding their bicycles and we observing all this as we had dinner in a sidewalk cafe.

My esteemed friend and I always enjoyed philosophical conversations on a wide range of themes derived from our respective experiences that inevitably ended with politics and History. That night had been especially memorable because the town was charming and the meal was excellent and the climate was perfect.

We had driven from Mexico City with a sailboat tied to the roof of the car, a portable catamaran, weighing eighty kilograms. I had contrived this sailboat and we wanted to try it out over the coral reefs in The Caribbean. But on that morning, we wanted to inspect the Ruins of Uxmal.

We were to meet the ghost of an ancient urbanist, a priest-architect, his spirit was everywhere; in the design of The Court of The Nunnery, in its magnificent frontispiece set over the whole quadrangle, framing the space with hundreds of thousands of carved stones representing sacred animals: toucans, parrots, snakes, sea shells, flowers… The immense Palace of the Governor with its magnificent Mayan arches framed by huge niches characteristic of the Puc Style developed at Uxmal by the Xiu family. The soft curves of the Pyramid of The Wizard reminiscent of The Princess of Uxmal… Moon Woman, Uxmal.

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Because they were Because they are Uxmal glitters Under the sun

A great artist lives for joy alone Joy is the Quadrangle at Uxmal The eye never tires of perfection, Of beauty.

Human perfection is a happy encounter With The Eternal, This we call Unity.

There is Unity Everywhere at Uxmal Eloquence and Unity, Speech and Art. ‘Over there’, pointed the hand, ‘We shall erect a pyramid, Over there’--- and there it is.

A courtyard, a quadrangle A columned temple, And the most beautiful frontispiece In the world.

Over there at Uxmal…

Uxmal.

For the beauty of Uxmal lingers long.

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Dear friend, Surrounded as it is by an expanse of green, A sea of immense peace Where the imagination was filled And found the Forms---The Golden Measure Of dimension and perspective, harmony, (Parallax and astral geometry, Knowledge of the Self), Thousands upon thousands of small eternities, White stones fitted for Eternity As archetypes to be brought.

(From this world we take graven images alone).

From the center of the courtyard Emerged the Princess of Uxmal, a Quetzal; A mouth so warm, the smile, the land.

During the day the sun shines over her; A temple, a cloud, a dress of white linen Revealing elegance, symmetry, sacral unity.

During the night She is another star.

Her dark, bright eyes Astral, mysterious, Moon-woman, Uxmal‌ Uxmal.

I reverently walked Among the ruins of Uxmal And heard the echoes: 48

The light footsteps Of the Princess of Uxmal, The voices of men And saw the profound dark eyes Of a priest-architect, The specter of silence Who observed the Stars, Who spoke in Quadrangles, Who was with The Eternal.

Who was, Who is, Through his hand At Uxmal.

Uxmal, November 17, 1978

I wrote some poetry there and on our way out we saw Elvira again. We noticed that she was at the far corner of the parking lot. We went looking for her as we wanted to buy more oranges. We asked her why she had gone so far from her place in the morning and she answered in a straight voice that she had been chased by her rivals. It was then that I noticed there was something strange with Elvira, something was not quite right; she was too refined to be selling oranges. It was true that since we had arrived in The Mayab I had been struck by the natural grace of the people and the civilized quality of the Maya language. But there was something else in Elvira.

Since it was getting late we offered her to take her home, to which she agreed. We took her to her house in the outskirts of the town and she asked us in. It was a very clean little palapa nicely furnished with hand painted chairs and a finely carved wardrobe, a small bed with a mosquito net and a bookcase with some books. Most of the books were in English, some in French and Italian and some in Spanish. She read the poetry of Salvatore Quasimodo, Constantino Cavafis and Georgios Seferis.

She prepared some tea. We sat around her table and stared deeply at each other, the three of us.

I asked her in English: ‘who are you?’, and she replied, ‘I can’t remember’. I went over to her bookshelves and started reading out loud the titles of her books. After a while she said: ‘I was an anthropologist, I was married to an archeologist. He died in Chiapas.’

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I sensed a well of grief here, ‘please tell us about it’. She gathered her strength and began: ‘It was in 1937, we had our camp in what was then the great Plaza at Tikal and Jack had been feeling very tired for days. He came down with malaria and I nursed him until we ran out of quinine and he was exhausted with fever and became delirious. I made the decision to break camp and return to San Cristobal de Las Casas. I had Jacinto and Canek, two Lacandon who were our guides and assistants on the excavation site. We had four mules, so I decided to use a camp bed and two poles to make a stretcher to be carried by two of the mules in tandem. We contrived to make a little tent over the camp bed with some canvas and mosquito net. I rode one of the mules and we packed all the supplies and equipment we could carry on the remaining mule and on our back packs.

We were heading towards The Usumacinta River, Yaxchilan and Bonampak and then to San Cristobal. Jack died on the way, in Bonanpak. I buried him by the temple of the Inscriptions, the one that has the fine murals. He didn’t want to go any further so I took him inside the Temple of the Murals and he died watching the paintings. I am sure he was studying them.

We ‘discovered’ the Site of Bonampak. Canek used to go there and pray to the gods Itzamna and the twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque and he thought that Bonampak would be a good place to rest on our way to San Cristobal. Eventually we left Bonampak and we travelled across the Mayan Lowlands through trails only known to the Lacandon until we reached Ocosingo and sometime later San Cristobal, where I fell ill and took a long time to recover.

It turned out that her real name was Evelyn Linton, an anthropologist from the University of Columbia, originally from Tunbridge Wells in Kent and had studied at Somerville College in Oxford, had met her archeologist husband at Columbia. They had come to Tikal on a grant from The Carnegie-Mellon Foundation on mule back from San Cristobal de las Casas in Chiapas, a trip through the jungle trails of the Lacandon and Peten that had taken nearly a month in 1937. They had used 50

the native trails along the borders of the Laguna Miramar with its sandy beaches and beautiful jungle of towering ceibas and then gone on to Bonampak, which they had practically discovered as Canek said that no one but The Lacandon knew about it. Further up the River Usumasinta they had reached Yaxchilan and then followed the jungle trails to Tikal in the Peten District of Northern Guatemala. ‘From one of the highest mounds in Bonampak the jungle extended wide towards the West as far as the eye could see. This was our way, along the Maya Lowlands we rode, Canek, Jacinto and I, towards Ocosingo and San Cristobal, riding our mules through the trails that only the Lacandon knew. I rode in a trance, overwhelmed by the grief of my loss, at first oblivious of our surroundings, being led deeper into the jungle. At night we slept on clearings where the bush was low and we could build a fire, we subsisted on a diet of roast monkey and rice and other edibles that the Lacandon found. We still had cones of chocolate from Tabasco.

Canek was a tall Lacandon, the very image of king Pakal of Palenque with his sharp long nose, keen black eyes, smooth skin and slender figure; he was a handsome Maya of engaging personality whom my late husband Jack held in high esteem because he said that Canek was a natural born leader of great intelligence and perspicacity who had a clear idea of the dangers posed by the encroaching world of Ladino Culture on the survival of The Maya.

He had discussed the paintings of Bonampak with Jack while he was dying. In his opinion the rulers of Bonampak had been cruel men obsessed with power and that at the end they had been defeated by their own people who had become fed up with them. Canek was in love with me. He behaved with great dignity and consideration towards my bereavement. With Jack dead I was on my own, he had been Senior Fellow with The Carnegie Grant and with both my parents dead I had nothing to do in Tunbridge Wells; I could go back to Columbia and resume my studies but I was already in love with the Land of The Maya, The Mayab. And Jack, my dear Jack, laid buried in Bonampak.

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We would travel by easy stages taking care of our mules and living off the land. I would sleep on our small tent in a light portable cot where Jack had died and Jacinto and Canek would camp in the open, sleep in their hammocks with mosquito nets. Jacinto was a beautiful boy of sixteen, rather thin, with beautiful hands, very expressive long fingers. When he wore the Lacandon long garb made of plain manta he looked like a beautiful woman with his long black hair and his merry eyes, deep set and melancholic. He could be very tough, with his machete he would kill a nauyaca with a single blow. I could not tell if Jacinto was Canek’s son or his nephew. I knew that Canek had several wives and that he lived near Lake Miramar in the Montes Azules and that apparently had had another family somewhere on the shores of the Lacantún River.

Originally the plan had been for Canek to deliver me to Ocosingo but I had grown listless and very passive and had let Canek sleep with me. So that eventually when he suggested that I go with him to Lake Miramar, I said yes. I already knew some about the Lacandon so I became a Lacandon woman and had a daughter with him whom we named Mina. I became friendly with Canek’s other wives and discovered that Jacinto was not his son nor his nephew but his lover, his moshe wife.

I loved Jacinto as well and spent a lot of time with him doing women’s chores. He died in 1953.

Canek is still alive though I haven’t seen him in a long while.’

Here Evelyn stopped her narrative and after offering us more tea and corncakes she let us pitch our tent in her backyard. Early next morning we said good-bye after promising to stop by on our way back from the Caribbean.

On the road, driving towards the sea, my esteemed friend and I were silent. What with our visit to Uxmal which none of us had seen before and our meeting with Evelyn Linton we had a lot on our minds. This had been our introduction to The Mayab. That night we found a nice motel with a camping ground outside Chichen-Itza that had a swimming pool which became a blessing after the long hot ride. In a restaurant, a large and well-appointed palapa, we had deer stew and beer and listened to the conversation in Maya of some elderly gentlemen, refined as college professors, which they could have been, and thought what a fine language Maya was as it sounded very civilized to our ears. We reminisced about Evelyn and her remarkable story and began to understand how a refined English woman from Tunbridge Wells might decide to marry a Mayan gentleman and live with the Lacandon. We were definitely going back to get the rest of her story, but first we wanted to go sailing at Punta Nizuc.

We left the Ruins of Chichen-Itza and headed for Punta Nizuc. On the way we stopped on what was to become Cancun which at the time was being developed. I wanted to talk with my friend from high school days, Luis Perrano-Passieu, who was a pioneer there. He was building thirty-two apartments which he proposed to sell in a ‘time-sharing’ venture; that is, he was going to sell each apartment forty-eight times at a rate of ten thousand dollars per week. This was business administration, the career he had chosen and which he had urged me to follow. I wish I had taken his advice; as it was, when I told this particular group of friends that I wanted to study literature, they turned pale and fell silent.

My esteemed friend, whose real name was Fernando Catalano Candia, was an architect and took some interest in the project, but he refrained from giving any advice as the works were well advanced and he knew from experience how offsetting unwelcome advice could turn out to be. Luis 52

knew all this, so the conversation turned towards our coming adventure in Punta Nizuc and he offered to take us there since he knew the place. We did want to know about the cost of construction per square meter, the current price of materials etc‌ which could come in handy someday, since I occasionally dabbled in the real estate business.

We followed Luis to the Airport of Cancun which was on our way to Punta Nizuc. The Airport had not yet been inaugurated and it was empty with no one around, so we drove into the brand-new airstrip, parked side by side, his Pontiac GTO and our Ford Maverik 390. We let our engines roar and challenged each other to a race. We easily beat Luis, my esteemed friend and I, with our catamaran on the roof of the car and all.

After the race we parted company with Luis and soon arrived to Punta Nizuc. Not far from The Club MediterranĂŠ, we came upon a deserted beach by the jungle which we liked and set up our camp. It was nearly evening and a beautiful sunset was about to break. We pitched our tent and unloaded the pontoons from the roof of the car, made dinner and turned in to a deserved sleep.

Next day we rose early to explore our surroundings, which we found agreeable. We had a hearty breakfast of oatmeal, eggs, sausages and tea, since according to H. Rider Haggard tea is best when out trekking in the country.

Next, we set about assembling our portable catamaran. We placed the equipment on a piece of reenforced canvass that was to be the deck, on the sand by the sea. The beach, on the edge of the jungle, stretched to a point not far away, some seven to ten miles, called Punta Nizuc, from which the coast turned south, where it found the barrier reef that continued all the way to the Gulf of Honduras, second largest one in the World after Australia’s Great Coral Barrier.

We had our reinforced aluminum two-inch pipes with steel braces and connections that made up the rectangular frame of the catamaran that entered telescopically on four other aluminum tubes set on the fiber glass hulls of the twelve feet pontoons and were bolted with double steel bolts. In the bow side of the frame I had designed a second aluminum pipe set some forty centimeters below the frame to take the reinforced steel braces that held the six-meter mast which was a single piece of strengthened aluminum 2 inch pipe on which I had pop bolted an aluminum curtain rail to hoist 53

the sail. The spar was attached to the mast on to a special steel carriage that had several slots to raise or lower it as needed. The mast had a cross bar some two meters long of one-centimeter thick aluminum to extend the steel cables that rigged the mast from mast top to the bow and midsection of the pontoons.

We hoisted the sail, made on order to my design by a jolly officer of the Mexican Navy, a three meter by five-meter affair with sheaths for light plywood ribs. We had first applied wax to the curtain rail so that the little carriages that ran inside would not get stuck and allow for a smooth hoist. We then roped to the frame the five by five feet reinforced synthetic plastic canvass that would be our deck, set the aluminum plated rudders to their extension pipes attached to the long rudder bar, fixed the pulleys to control the sail, disposed our four pointed steel Anker tied to the bow frame; readied our two long, four feet by one foot, ayacahuite wooden keels that went in their respective slots on the frame of the pontoons once the boat was afloat on the sufficient depth of water.

We contemplated our work with satisfaction and without further ado prepared our diving gear, bottles of the suggested weak tea plus some oranges, life jackets, common rate sailor’s hats and a couple of oars I had had made by an expert marine carpenter from the wood of the light weight but very resistant ayacahuite tree, completed our gear.

After studying our chart, we set sail, there and then, for a coral bank in front of Punta Nizuc.

The sea was calm and sparkled with our joy, ours for the day. There were few clouds and a light breeze set in, it took us towards the shore that made a long ‘L’ with the coast that came from the Cancun side and the shallows where Nichupté Lagoon emptied on the Caribbean Sea. This was the maiden voyage of our sloop built by myself from assorted material pilfered from shops in Mexico City. The pontoons I had bought from an Old Italian rouge who built boats in The City. He had seen better days as a playboy in Acapulco when they had started motor boat races in The Bay. And working from the pontoons I had imagined the rest and built from there.

It was working well, the whole contraption, it felt sturdy if a bit overloaded; what with all the steel parts and ourselves, it tended to dip in in the bow so we sat as far back as we could, taking turns to steer and work the sail that threatened to knock our heads each time we tacked, we had to raise the spar a bit.

Eventually we reached our destiny and threw our Anker in shallows near the corals were we saw the waves foaming, the sea breaking on the reefs and the horizon beyond The Point where the Yucatan Chanel had depths of over a thousand feet and the strong currents of the open sea crested mountains of water that rolled incessantly on their way to the Gulf of Honduras.

We put on our fins, our face masks and snorkels and dived to better secure the Anker, then we swam towards the reef and the unsuspected life of the Sea. We saw wonderful coral gardens full of fish swimming across the algae into the coral trees and over sandy paths where we followed.

After a while of this contemplation we went back to the catamaran and had some oranges. There were no other boats in sight, no one. The coast here was a long line of mangroves interspersed with the low jungle along the Yucatan coast, no sandy beaches here, with the sea breaking on the reef and the mangroves, save for the small bay where we were camping. After a while more of snorkeling we decided to sail back to our camp.

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We raised the sail and headed into the wind towards the open sea, smooth and sparkling, with our sail full, the boat canting and us moving about using our weights to keep us on course, we made long tasks each time coming back to the edge of the mangrove. After an hour of this we realized we were not gaining much headway as we had come back to the corals where we had been swimming.

We went further out from the coast to see if we could catch stronger winds that would make us gain some way. The wind was coming from the coast, from the West, pushing us out towards the Yucatan Channel and Cuba. We made a long tack and while coming about, the spar hit me on the side of the head and threw me overboard.

I was underwater quite stunned struggling to come up for air. As I surfaced I saw the catamaran not fifty meters away with the bow towards me, the sail rustling and flapping. I swam over as my esteemed friend threw a bit of line my way. I grabbed hold and he pulled me in vigorously. I have neglected to describe him fully, he is of medium height (I hope he is still alive and well), well built, ball headed, light brown, blondish sort of hair with a moustache, small, malicious, ironic eyes; a deep, bass voice, in short, a man of the world who’d been in the Amazon in a small canoe, gone from Iquitos to Manaus by himself and who always knew what to do in emergencies, the right sort of fellow to have on an expedition.

After my return to the boat we put our heads together and decided that the best thing would be to head back towards the mangrove and paddle along the coast as we had the land wind against us and the current debouching from the Nichupté was too strong and was heading us off to Cuba.

We duly got to the mangrove and started paddling up the coast, after an hour of this, we realized that we would go much faster if we pushed the boat along the shallows near the mangrove which we did and after a couple of ours of this we got to a place where we saw a motor boat tied to a pole and a track leading somewhere along the jungle.

We tied the catamaran to the pole, the sail we had already lowered and secured. We had no shoes so we cut the rag we had in pieces and tied it around our feet. My esteemed friend volunteered to stay with the boat while I looked for help, perhaps a motor boat that would tow us back to our camp. After some twenty minutes of walking under some tall ceibas, arborets and low laying bush I came in sight of a pier were a young man was working in a boat near a mangrove.

He saw me coming and waved, he was not Mexican, he was a Frenchman from The Club Mediterrané. I spoke to him in French: ‘Salut, bon soir, je suis en pane, je suis avec un copin, la mer nous a éloigné beacoup dans notre petit bateau a voile; nous ne puvons pas remonter la current’ Oui, J’ai remarqué votre bateau, si vou voulez je pourrai vous remorquer un bout.

Super bien, merci.

Alors on y va, montez.

C’est pas tres loin, nous sommes pres d’un canot automobile lié sur un poste.

Oui, je connais.

We were on our way to be rescued, the Frenchman was ‘un bon ga’, very fit, un ‘gentil animateur’ under contract with The ‘Club Med´. We were there in a thrice, my esteemed friend waved us in.

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A cable was passed and Fernando tied it to the mast bolt and sat back to steer the boat. We were towed very nicely and in half an hour were back in our camp. We had a couple of beers with the ‘gentil animateur’. It was seven o’clock in the evening, we had been out since nine in the morning and we had only eaten a couple of oranges but we were full of the sea and the sea breeze and we were glad we had not lost our boat.

The ‘gentil animateur’ had explained to us that it was not a good idea to sail off Punta Nizuc in such a light boat on account of the strong current debouching from the Nichupté Lagoon.

He recommended Puerto Morelos, some thirty kilometers dawn the coast. He said the Coral reef there made a sea lagoon some ten kilometers long by some five hundred meters wide from the beach with an average depth of six to ten feet, and that the coral gardens were splendid to snorkel in. It sounded wonderful.

That night as we were in the tent ready to turn in my esteemed friend motioned me to keep quiet and pointed towards a pair of red dots some ten meters from our tent. There was a large figure sitting there, we could see it through the mosquito net, it looked like a big animal, I made a move towards ‘grandpa’, the twelve gage, 1856, Colt shotgun that had once belonged to my grandfather, the Reverend James Potter Conover; but my esteemed friend made a negative motion.

‘Es un Jaguar, mi estimado´, he said in Spanish, ‘Estamos en su territorio’.

We sat there looking at the Jaguar for about half an hour, He sat placidly looking at us for he knew that we were watching. After a while he left and we went to sleep. He was not hungry, and besides, we were not his type of meat…

Next morning we saw his tracks around the tent. After breakfast we broke camp. Took the catamaran apart and loaded it on the Maverik, fastening everything with tensor cables to the especially designed grid on the roof of the car.

The road to Puerto Morelos went along the coast and we had a view of the Coral Sea with the surf breaking on the corals some five hundred meters from the beach. Sometimes the road went inland and we had a view of the immense low laying jungle without a mountain in sight, not so much as a hillock, a far as the eye could see; a sea of green and the sky over it, the same sky that ranged over the sea that appeared now and then, defining the coast, until we came to a side road branching off from the left, that led to Puerto Morelos. The road was straight, bordered by low jungle teaming with life, giving of the smell of the sea and of rotting vegetation, a smell that comes out of the bajos, accompanied with the continuous hum of the bugs and the insects that is the sound of the jungle.

Puerto Morelos was at the time a very small fishing village pointing towards the future with its small plaza and adjacent streets of empty lots prefiguring the town that was to be. The Cetina family had founded the town at the Time of Don Porfirio. The Cetina had been chicleros in Chiapas who became Yucatecos and had brought over a bunch of chicleros to help settle the New Territory of Quintana Roo that had been artfully contrived by ‘Don Porfix’ to divide the people of Yucatan after the many wars that had racked the Peninsula; some wars were to free themselves from the Mexicans, others to put dawn the Maya who wanted to free themselves, in their turn, from ‘The Casta Dorada’ of Creole in Merida who oppressed them from their Haciendas.

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My esteemed friend who is an architect and fancies himself an urbanist immediately remarked the preplanned urban grid pointing towards the future and advised me to continue driving towards the outskirts to find a suitable place to park by the sea. We chose one of the last lanes tangential to the sea bereft of houses save one which we passed and coming to the end of the street parked by the beach. And there under some palm trees, pitched our tent and unloaded the catamaran.

There was a strong breeze blowing from the sea from the direction of Cuba, Puerto Morelos being the easternmost point of The Republic of Mexico. We were exposed there to hurricanes that blow in from The Caribbean. The sky was overcast with clouds that lent a deep tone of dark blue to the sea, freshening the atmosphere, giving a low reading to our barometer. The reef was boiling with foam a good five hundred meters from the calm beach. We weighted the inside canvas floor of our light green Coleman tent with all our equipment, the metal frame that supported it coming to a point from which the tent was suspended. Five people could easily sleep inside the tent so it was quite comfortable for the two of us what with our inflated mattresses we slept well and we could stand up inside if we wanted, with plenty space for our equipment.

The wind picked up and our tent threatened to inflate like a balloon and take off. We parked the car in front of the tent to give us some cover, shelter from the strong wind. We cooked some rice with fish in soy sauce and vegetables in our little portable gas stove we had placed inside the car on the floor for better protection from the wind. We drank beer kept cool in an ancient metallic icebox, the same one I had taken to Huautla some ten years before and which my parents had used on picnics in the early fifties; I still have it in July 2018. It still works.

Next morning we put together the catamaran and this time we took some provisions out to sea which included a bottle of wine. We spent the whole day snorkeling by an undersea fresh water spring that produced a veritable subaquatic garden of Eden that included lobsters, octopus, sea serpents, small sharks called cazones and an incredible variety of fish including a type of red snapper that eats lobster called boquinete and a delicious variety of small fish called chakchis in honor of Chak, the rain god of the Maya.

That afternoon on the beach we met Raul and Candelario, two neighbors about our age, from Puerto Morelos. Raul owned the solitary house that was some hundred yards from the beach where we were camping. He was a chemist who worked in his own medical analysis lab in Cancun. Candelario was Contramaestre, quartermaster, on the ferry boat that plied the waters between Puerto Morelos and Cozumel. They were partners in a fishing boat that was laying right on the beach near our catamaran; it was a Mexican version of the Boston Whaler, very popular along these coasts.

They invited us fishing early next morning at sunrise to help them haul in their nets. We were delighted. Our friends came by early next morning and called our names, when we emerged from our tent they were already pushing their boat into the sea. We were glad to give a hand and climbed aboard as Raul started the motor and steered out towards the reef where he quickly found a passage that he knew towards the open sea and you could tell by the large swells, the hidden depths much greater than inside the reef. Out there we were in another sea as we noticed the thin line of the low laying coast with the tiny palm trees and the open sea everywhere as far as Cuba.

We soon came in sight of a lonely buoy with a red flag towards which Raul was steering. This was the place where they had laid their nets the evening before. This is where the work began and very 57

interesting it turned out to be. Candelario, a big sturdy fellow from Mazatlan, Sinaloa, a good natured Saint Bernard, raised the buoy where the end of the net was; he explained that the net was a hundred and fifty meters long by about a meter and a half wide; it formed an ‘L’ with three buoys, two at its ends and one at the short half of the “L”. The thing was that two people should haul in the net, while Raul kept the boat going slowly at a suitable speed while a third person folded the net and threw back into the sea certain undesirable fish that were not deemed commercial. Candelario was going to do this last task while Catalano and I would haul in the net.

So we put our backs to it and readily got into the feeling of it as the fish began appearing and a goodly sight they were: snappers, boquinetes, plenty of chakchis, lobsters, cazones and an assorted company of all colors and sizes. Most were still alive and some were throw back to the sea. It must have been eight thirty in the morning with a clear sky and the bellies of the waves showing green, the boat being taken smoothly ridding the seas and the motor whirring, missing a few beats as the propeller came out in the air. We went looking for the channel, the silhouettes of the coral trees visible underwater refracted by the light of the sun.

A smooth swell brought us in to the beach of white soft sand. We helped unload the fish on to large plastic containers and were taught how to open them and clean their insides. We got to take our pick as a reward for the mornings work. We took a large lobster, a boquinete and two chakchis.

Soon the vans from the Cancun restaurants would come to fetch the day’s catch and this was how Raul and Candelario made some extra cash before heading for their usual jobs. They would be back in the evening to throw in the nets and we would accompany them.

We had a small banquet for breakfast and afterwards sailed up and dawn the lagoon, with me instructing Fernando how to head into the wind, tack and keep a steady course without capsizing the boat. Suddenly out of nowhere a very strong wind coming from land took us violently over the reef before we had time to lower the sail and throw in the Anker. We were in the open sea nearly capsizing and very far from the reef. We saw the land as a thin strip and thought that we were gone.

We nearly panicked and felt sad because we thought that we were going to die; so desperate we saw the situation which had changed in the twinkle of an eye. So treacherous is The Caribbean Sea that you can pass from joy to despair in the bat of an eye.

Then, most refreshingly, we saw a fishing boat by the reef some distance away, we took our life jackets off which were colored red and started waving them madly towards the distant boat but to no effect. We continued waving them in despair for about fifteen minutes while all the time we were drifting away towards the Yucatan Chanel and certain death, so we thought; when suddenly we saw the boat turn in our direction approaching, our hearts leaped with joy and sure enough in a few minutes they were beside us.

They said that they had not come earlier because they thought we were waving Hello! This was the second time within a few days that we were being towed to safety. We thought that if there was a third time we might not be so lucky. So we decided not to push our luck too far and relax for a couple of days. Very heartily we thanked the fishermen who said it was nothing and gave us some water to drink.

That evening we went with our new friends, Raul and Candelario to have dinner to the restaurant of Don Ezequiel Cetina, an elderly gentleman, who was the godfather of Puerto Morelos. It was a 58

very agreeable Palapa facing the Warf and the sea. We had a large seafood cocktail called ‘vuelve a la vida’ appropriately named to commemorate our recent experience.

Don Ezequiel joined us and we started a conversation about South Eastern Mexico and the founding of Puerto Morelos of which his family had had something to do. He said that they were originally chicleros in the jungle lowlands of Chiapas around Palenque but that they had owned a house in San Cristobal de Las Casas which they still kept and went now and again because they had friends there and he mentioned Doña Gertrudis Blum (Gertrude, “Trudy”, Duby-Blom), who kept a famous guest house there, from where she and her husband organized expeditions during the 1940’s and 50’s into the jungle looking for Mayan ruins. I asked him if he had heard of a certain Englishwoman who lived with a Lacandon shaman and he answered that, certainly, he had met an English woman married to an archeologist when he was a young man back in the 30’s; but that they had disappeared in the jungles of Peten never to be heard from again.

My esteemed friend and I looked at each other in surprise. ‘Well, we found her’ we said in unison.

And we recounted for the benefit of the company our recent experience with Elvira. The sun was setting so we had so more wine and heard other stories of The Mayab and had altogether a delightful evening. After thanking Don Ezequiel for his hospitality we walked along the beach with our friends enjoying the night and the cool breeze from the sea after its previous fury of the day; we reflected on the changing moods of the sea and how it somehow became a mirror to our own turbulent souls and how we must learn to make peace with the Sea and the World and with our own selves.

After a few more days of swimming, fishing, snorkeling and careful sailing, applying all the knowledge we had gained, we decided to return to Uxmal. We said good-bye to our friends not forgetting to pay one last visit to Don Ezequiel. On our way back we stopped at Chichen to have one last swim at that lovely motel and to eat cochinita pibil, spicy pork dishes, as we had decided to abstain from deer it being an endangered species in Yucatan, or so we preferred to think, out of respect for the species carrier of the spores of the Sacred Plant, Psylocibe Mexicana.

After dinner my esteemed friend surprised me by saying that he was going to Boston next morning.

He said that he had not wanted to tell me so as not to subtract suspense from our enterprises.

He said that The Massachusetts Institute of Technology had recognized his work in Santiago with Salvador Allende and wanted him to teach at the School of Architecture there. I congratulated him and regretted that I should not enjoy his valuable company aboard.

We had been friends for several years ever since he had arrived from Santiago after the coup and now his sojourn in Mexico had ended. He had taught at several Mexican Universities and had advised the Government in projects of communal self-construction. He called himself ‘a bare foot architect’, ‘un arquitecto descalzo’, when in reality he belonged to one of the oldest families in Argentina where his father and grandfather had one of the more prestigious architectural firms, he had decided to become an itinerant architect inspired by Che Guevara. I was going to miss him, our open conversations on any subject we could think of as we drove on Mexican highways on our way to the sea, would make us pass the time without realizing the distance, we would suddenly get there and have our first glimpse of the sea. He was a man of action, of wide experience, interested in many subjects and all kinds of people, ready to explore the remotest regions…

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So we said good-bye the next morning at Chichen, fittingly, in front of The Castle, he going to Merida and I to Uxmal.

When I got to Elvira’s house she was sitting in her garden on a little stool feeding her chickens. She greeted me in English and asked about Fernando. I told her he had gone to Boston. I sat beside her on a small wooden chair and commented on her lovely little garden by the fields where maize grew, ‘las milpas’.

‘I have a little garden in Mexico City I made myself’, she surprised me.

‘I thought you hadn’t been to The City in a long while’.

‘I left Tunbridge Wells when I was eighteen; you see, my mother was an American from Philadelphia and I went to Columbia University in New York. After Canek left me I went to live with my daughter Mina in Mexico City. I bought a piece of land there with some money my father left me. And built a little house there with a ceramic shop and a garden.’

‘That’s nice’, I said, ‘I love ceramics’.

‘You can help me repair my oven.’

‘I’d love to.’

‘Well, why don’t we go back to The City?’

‘Let’s go.’

Elvira left her house to Doña Pachita Xiu, her best friend, packed her books a few clothes and we left. We stayed for a few days in the City of Campeche which we both loved, went to the beach, read poetry aloud, stayed in an old pension in the Calle 10, read so more poetry in the terrace of our room overlooking the sea, we read Cavafis, Seferis, Quasimodo. We ate Pan de Cazón at Los Portales by the Plaza overlooking the Fine Cathedral.

She was very happy, she wore a fine white dress with embroidered flowers in the Maya fashion with a jade necklace she had filched from a tomb in Bonampak. She told me there and then, over drinks sitting in a restaurant by the Plaza, that she would go to Oxford to deliver a series of lectures on the Maya.

Our trip to The City was uneventful, except that we stopped in La Venta, Tabasco to admire The Olmec Heads which Elvira assured me were a legacy from Atlantis. In Lake Catemaco we ate Monkey and went dawn to Monte Pio by the sea to swim in a jungle stream near an old house that had been built by English buccaneers in the XVIIth Century who owned slaves there. In the Port of Veracruz we had lunch in the Arcades by thy pier and bough some ground coffee as a present for Mina.

We arrived in The City at night and went straight to Coyoacán to the old street of Francisco Soza, where the Conquistadors had first lived, were Elvira had bought land in the 1940’s. I parked the Maverik with the catamaran on top besides her old Ford convertible Roadster from the 1940’s.

Her house was a charming little one story house with a tile roof she had designed herself with a Maestro de Obras in the tradition of the Mexican Pueblos; except that she had some very fine pieces of old English furniture and some inlaid tables she had made herself according to her own designs.

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Everything was covered with white linen sheets which we removed to reveal the ensemble just as she had left it several years before. I noticed some magnificent pieces of glazed pottery in topaz and aqua marine greens with a gold grain, done in an elegant latticed style, some were lamps and others very fine decorative bowls. She had some Su-Budd puppets from Bali from a trip she had made to Asia in the 1930’s.

‘I’ll show you the ceramics shop.’ It was a beautiful shop that could have come out of the middle ages with big windows giving to a small rustic garden surprisingly well kept. The shop contained ample shelves full of cubic, white plaster molds of all sizes she had made herself over the years.

She showed me the oven, a metallic cube about one cubic meter with a small door that had a little window to peer inside. She wanted to change the refractory bricks that walled it in the inside. We agreed that I should come in a couple of days to give her time to settle in and see her daughter Mina. So I went over to my place nearby in San Angel, unloaded the catamaran and the gear and went to greet my parents.

A few days later I met Mina, a very personable young woman who was married to a Dutch sculptor named Peter Knighe with whom she had a couple of twin blond boys named Jacinto and Pim. I also met Alban and Justin, interior decorators who had kept Evelyn’s house all the years she had been away. It turned out that Mina was a good friend of my elder sister Malú and that her boys were students in a Montessori School kept by my sisters, Malú and Regina. Apparently, Mina had become very Guadalupana, a devotee of the Virgin of Guadalupe, under the influence of Malú, and this amused Evelyn and Peter very much and they called Mina, La Guadalupana, to her great consternation, although she smiled and pretended to take it lightly.

Evelyn took a great interest in getting her house going again and to celebrate she had me for drinks one day, bloody Maries, she prepared. We sat in her sitting room overlooking her lovely garden through French windows that gave to a terrace. She came in in an embroidered Maya dress with her favorite necklace from Bonampak and introduced me to Fernanda Corvera, a woman slightly older than myself, with the pre-arranged intention that we should become attached to each other, which we did. We became lovers that same night in a sort of strange transference of the love we both felt for Evelyn.

Fernanda was slim, with short blond-brownish hair, delicate features, tanned, lovely skin and a warm mouth; she had had polio in her childhood and had a leg shorter than the other that she curled about me in a loving way when we made love. She was a taciturn girl, a bit shy, who loved poetry and painting. We were friends for many years although we never married.

It came out that Evelyn was much older than I thought and had been commuting secretly from Mexico City and the South East of the Republic for many years; she loved The Maya and she loved to live as a Mayan woman in Yucatan which she was as she had lived with Canek several years, spoke Maya, and had had a child with him, Mina, while living with him in The Montes Azules near Bonampak. But she was also an English woman from Tunbridge Wells who had been granted Mexican citizenship by the Mexican Government, a rare honor at the time in the 1960’s.

And her thesis was that the Maya had never been conquered by the Spanish and that they had never converted to Christianity but had always remained faithful to their ancestral Gods and their unique Culture and that they should form a single State, The Gran Mayab, out of all the areas they now 61

inhabited. And this, she felt, was needed to be said in the most principal forums. So she gathered her notebooks and many articles she had written over the years and prepared to go to Oxford.

She wrote to Sir William Alexander, Dean of Magdalen College, who was a distant cousin, and was duly invited to visit the University. We were all very glad and when the day came, which coincided with the anniversary of her eightieth birthday she went to England accompanied by Mina, Peter and the twins.

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LAKE SENTANI

The same sea that bathes the Strait of Malacca and the shores of Singapore reaches Hollandia and Tanahmerah Bay in New Guinea, where the Cyclops Mountains stride dawn to the ocean like giants.

At the mountain tops, the jungle meets the clouds above Lake Sentani and from the shores of the lake mist rises towards the plains that lie between it and the mountains. It was here that the Japanese built three runways for their airplanes after the fall of Singapore in 1942. It was part of Hakko Ichiu, their plan to conquer Asia. Many people were drawn into this maelstrom, so many that the most unlikely characters gathered at the shores of Lake Sentani from all parts of the Globe, even some natives of New Guinea itself.

Jocelyne de Courtenay was a young Belgian Nun of the Ursuline Order from The Princess Juliana School for girls in Batavia who had asked to be stationed at the mission on the shores of Lake Sentani before the Japanese Army arrived. The sisters were quickly relocated to a concentration camp along with 120 Sikhs that had been evacuated after the fall of Singapore to work as construction laborers in New Guinea. Captain Ravindra Singh Baramili was their leader, the force of the Sikh Battalion that remained after fighting at Niyal and kluang on 25 January 1942 during The Battle for Singapore.

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The camp stood on a hill overlooking Lake Sentani and was surrounded by barbed wire. The wire fence stretched over a sloping field that came dawn to the shore of the lake near a mud bank that was used as a disciplinary compound where offending inmates were left to perish with only their heads sticking out of the mud.

Early in 1942 the Japanese began building an air strip and for this purpose marched out at sunrise the men of Captain Baramili’s brigade. The Ursuline sisters had been stripped of their habits and were being used as slaves in various capacities which included being entertainers to the garrison troops of the compound. Jocelyn de Courtenay had been selected by General Kitazano himself to be his personal sex slave. She was tied naked by a leash attached to a dog collard in her neck and repeatedly beaten and raped until all semblance of resistance vanished from her will and she had become insensible to the ill treatment she received which included being gang raped by the orderlies of the general until she cried his name and general Kitazano came to take her and sodomize her in his quarters until she screamed with pleasure and laid prostrated groaning softly, overwhelmed by shame and a desire she did not understand and did not wish to accept.

She no longer appeared working in the vegetable garden where Captain Baramili would sometimes see her from afar behind the barbed wire that separated the men’s compound. She lay naked tied to one of the legs of the General’s desk where she had become docile, as the General said, on her hands and knees, waiting for the order to raise her behind for the General to take her.

At night laying in the floor tied to the bed in the General’s room she would feel her anus throbbing in pain with an unbearable itch that filled her with alarm. She was twenty-two years old with full pear shaped breasts, long slim legs and a Venus mons pubis that had been shaved by the General himself. Her hair had been cut by an orderly but was growing back again. She was required to groom the General in his bathroom, bathe him or kneel at his command and suck his penis dry, swallowing his semen. In return she was fed reasonably well in a bowl like a bitch, naked, her hands tied to her back kneeling on the floor in a corner of the officer’s mess, fed to maintain her strength and occasionally given a short dress and cosmetics and obliged to drink sake with the men.

And she abandoned herself, surprised by her acquiescence, constantly in a state of fright, numbed by terror. Without knowing why she was excited, expecting the next humiliation, fearing pain but submitting to the rough manhandling she was subjected to; overwhelmed by the desire she felt when she was penetrated from behind; as if this form of humiliation established her complete captivity. And she had had multiple orgasms, the Japanese soldiers let her live because they knew that she liked it and this flattered their vanity and she used this to survive. She had first been ravished by Sargent Inouye, singled out from her group of sisters when the Japanese had arrived at the Mission.

Perhaps it was her slender figure and deep blue eyes of unfathomable innocence that had captured the attention of the Sargent. She seemed so vulnerable to Sargent Inouye transformed by the power he had been given over all these women in their white cotton habits, the excitement of the opportunity suddenly possessed him and he had seized sister Jocelyne by both wrists and had dragged her to the beach by the lakeside and there in view of that magnificent body of water and its many islands had raped her, taken her from behind, impaled her and implanted in her unconscious the suggestion that this was the way to please her captors and diminish her pain and perhaps divert to herself the punishment she thought would be met by her sisters in charity.

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So she had been dragged to the beach and defiled in the sandy shores of Lake Sentani in sight of her sisters and of her rival, Sister Louise de Noailles. Her act of submission to the Sargent was seized upon by sister Louise as a betrayal to her vows and not as a sacrifice, thus alienating her from the majority of her companions until each of the sisters in their turn suffered the same fate, harassment by the Japanese garrison, which had been confined there as much as their captives, by the circumstance of a war of conquest and the overpowering presence of the jungle and of the Cyclops Mountains.

About a hundred and twenty missionaries and nuns gathered from Eastern New Guinea had been concentrated at Hollandia and then been interned at a camp on the shores of Lake Sentani.

The barbed wired installations consisted of a few wooden plank structures with palm thatched roofs, about twelve square feet per inmate and the contents of a small suitcase with their personal belongings held in bondage, used for trafficking with the Japanese soldiers in a desperate game of survival.

2

Several hundred miles from Lake Sentani, Colonel Harry, ‘the horse’, Liversedge sat brooding over a large map he had unfolded on the sandy beach of another shore on another Island. He was cursing general Hester loudly for trying to ‘get at Munda from behind’. His men were stuck in the mud several miles dawn the Bairoko trail trying to get at Munda from behind… If there was ever a case where you should never attack from the rear this was it; the main landings should have been at Laiana and not at Zanana. Hester was an incompetent ass, a ‘political general’, and he, Harry ‘the horse’, always got the toughest assignments, but this was stupid, and his men were dying in the bogs.

His young orderly, Phelps, came running dawn the beach with a voice radio on his hand, ‘Captain Cliff is on the line, Sir, he’s askin’ for you’. He grabbed the proffered radio-telephone and spoke into the voice piece.

‘What’s up Monty, are you holdin’ the line?’ He heard the whizzing noise of mortar fire over the line mixed with the crackling of the telephone.

‘Just barely, Sir, wish we had some air cover. Sargent Croft has just got back and says there’s a column of Japs coming up the Munda Trail. We’ve sustained some heavy casualties and can’t hold up much longer.’

‘Damn those lousy, slinking, japs’ expostulated the Coronel, ‘I’ve sent Blue Company to execute Plan ‘B’, to block the trail from Bairoko Harbor to relive the pressure you are feeling, hold on Cliff, I’m gonna see you get The Purple Heart for this…’

‘Colonel, with all due respect, pretty soon there’ll be no one left standing to pin no ribbons on’…

‘Hold on Monty, you’ve got Larry Croft there to put some spunk up your backbone if you feel you’re crackin’…

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‘It’s unkind of you to say that, Sir, you know I’ll do my duty come what may’…

‘Hold the line Mont, block for us, there’s a Landing coming soon at Bairoko, ‘Pug’ Ainsworth and ‘Uncle Dan’ are runnin’ this show, remember? They won’t let us down.’

‘Get me Munda Head Quarters on the double, Phelps.’

3

Captain Giles Downing felt threatened by Captain Lord Ashburn of Her Majesty’s cruiser-minelayer Ariadne. When visiting Singapore or Hong Kong he had been intimidated by the ‘Royal debonair’ of the Brits; no longer now, he could hold his own in front of Lord Ashburn. After the fall of both ‘The Kong’ and Singapore, the sinking of The Ark Royal and of The Prince of Wales by the Japanese Air Force off the coast of Malaya, the Brits had come down a notch or two. Still he had to admit there was something about Lord Ashburn that unfazed him at times. His ironic smile and the bulge beneath his belt. He couldn’t pull rank on him because they were both Captains, nonetheless he was sure he would take him to the woodshed sometime.

Admiral William Halsey and staff (US Navy photo)

Around the conference table with Admiral Halsey and others Ashburn had cracked a joke about the terms they had employed in naming the different battle plans for The New Georgia ‘Show’. “‘Jacodet’, what a curious name, Captain Downing”, had said Ashburn, “where did you get it from?

‘Blackboy’, ‘Catsmeat’, ´Aperiant’”. His ironic smile implied that there was a hidden meaning here…

What on earth did he mean by it; the Brit’s sense of humor… he would take him to the woodshed…

Damn him, he was charming…

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An orderly came into the conference room aboard Cruiser Honolulu, flagship of the Villa-Bairoko Bombardment Group and handed a coded telegram to Admiral “Pug” Ainsworth. Pug took it and read: ‘jap attack in overwhelming strength all along the Dragon’s Peninsula, request help, our forces in dire straits…’ signed, ‘Harry the Horse’.

Next morning, July 9, 1943, “Harry the horse” Liversedge awoke hungry and unhappy to find his wounded needed care and that his radio communications had been smashed by a fallen tree.

No matter, he had already asked for help so he detached ‘B’ Company to take care of the wounded and the rest headed down the Bairoko trail towards a village named Triri where the trail forked North towards Enogai Point and a rice lunch with the Japanese. A flight of Marine Corps planes dropped parachutes laden with K-rations, chocolates and mortar shells which came in handy that same evening as they came to Enogai…

Nearby in Kula Gulf, aboard the “Lucky Goose”, as Cruiser Honolulu was fondly called by the ship’s company, “Pug” Ainsworth and his men sat drinking ‘jamoke’ unaware that a couple of unseen and undetected Japanese destroyers had sent deadly ‘Parthian shots’, long range Lance torpedoes, that broke sister cruiser Helena in two.

Havoc broke loose aboard Helena as she went down, her oil-soaked engineers clambered up escape ladders from the innermost recesses of the ship chased by great tongues of fire and the rushing seas in their hurry to dive overboard and save their lives… No quarter given by the Japanese they shelled these ships from Enogai point with their five inch guns before “Harry the Horse” could get them from behind and silence them.

Meanwhile aboard sinking Helena, Top side turret number one had just blown up from a fire that had reached her ammunition racks; burning sailors glided by like human torches running on a corpse strewn deck, slipping on the blood soaked planks strewn with severed human members, as the stern half of the ship jack knifed into the depths; while the men who could still scramble jumped overboard and started swimming as fast as they could to escape the undertow and the underwater explosions that were sure to follow.

Captain Cecil and some eighty men organized a small craft convoy with two motor powered whaleboats pulling two rafts piled with wounded and dying men. Some two hundred other men who had no raft to cling to gathered around the bow section of Helena which refused to sink and continued to float all night long, the men attached to a hulk that looked like the giant fin of a monstrous shark. Early next morning most of these men reached a small island off Rice Anchorage not far from where, not a week ago, they had landed Coronel ‘Harry the Horse’ Liversedge and his brigade. A signalman in one of the whale boats blinked an S.O.S. signal to a passing destroyer belonging to ‘Pug’ Ainsworth’s Squadron and were rescued, some two hundred and fifty out of the original seven hundred and forty five survivors of the crew of Helena; for many of the swimmers had died of their wounds during the night or were eaten by sharks before they were rescued by the destroyers.

Another boat that was jack knifed that night and broke in two in Kula Gulf off Kolombangara Island was Jack Kennedy’s PT 105. He was eventually rescued by some natives as is well known. What is not known is that he was evacuated to Noumea aboard Her Majesty’s ship Ariadne and there treated for his back injury by WAAC nurse Julia Orwell who became his lover. And it was thanks to Miss 67

Orwell’s capable hands that Jack was able to recuperate and return to service in time for the Hollandia and Tanahmerah Bay Show. After the base at Hollandia was established Jack pulled strings to have Julia Orwell and Margaret Obaldistone transferred to Hollandia and this is how they all met at a New Year’s party organized by “Scrappy” Kessing, the base Commander.

Meanwhile in the jungles of The Dragon’s Head, Sargent Larry Croft, lean and hungry, advanced rapidly along a trail that led to Enogai Point. He was Chief Scout and Ranger in the Brigade sent to study the layout of the Japanese compound by Captain Cliff. He preferred to work by himself and he carried a long barreled 7.7mm rifle he had taken from a Japanese sniper he had killed with his knife after he had observed a bulging net hanging from a tree the night before. He liked the fine telescopic sight it carried, and admired Japanese optics and the flash less powder of the cartridges, like the professional killer that he was. He loved the Jungle ever since he had been a kid in Baton Rouge, he was a true Cajun and had been a saucier at a fancy restaurant in New Orleans.

He thought about his Captain, Montgomery Cliff, who was a pacifist from New York, lived in Washington Square, he had said, and was a historian who taught at some fancy boy’s school in New Hampshire. He loved the man because he was a good leader, very much concerned about everyone in ‘C’ Company and he was very savvy about strategy, most have gotten it out of all them books he read. But he, Lawrence Croft, was a loner and he liked to prowl at night when he felt free of all the cares of the World and thought that he was the last man left alive.

Sister Jocelyn de Courtenay had been returned to the women’s compound ill with malaria. Louise de Noaille had replaced her as the General’s favorite, and the General worked her over mercilessly.

Jocelyn’s anus was infected with the constant bleeding of the ill treatment she had received. Her fellow sisters ministered to her; did all they could, but she was dying. Captain Baramily got wind of the situation and decided to take a chance: while out working on the airfield he and his men were building for the Japanese, he had been contacted surreptitiously by a New Guinean native who lived in the Cyclops Mountains sent by an Australian coast watcher who had been a planter in the region.

Baramily returned word to the planter about Jocelyn de Courtenay, and a plan was devised to get her out of the compound. Chief Nilik of The Kurelu who lived in The Cyclops Mountains sent a potent somniferous that simulates death. Sister Jocelyn was put to sleep and that night was buried outside the compound by a detail of his men escorted by the Japanese. The Sikhs craftily placed a hollow bamboo over the ‘corpse’s’ face and before dawn two of Chief Nilik’s men absconded with the ‘corpse’ to the Kurelu village high up in The Cyclops Range.

Jocelyn was nursed back to life and became a member of the tribe; she had to go around naked with the rest of the women who applied to her skin the juice of a certain plant that made her look like one of them. They made her hair fuzzy and wrapped it around a net and gave her a couple of pigs and some children to look after, so she went native and no one would have recognized her for the former Baroness de Courtenay, a sister of The Ursuline Order.

Not long after this, the Australian Coast Watcher was caught and killed by the Japanese and Chief Nilik sent word to Captain Baramily that someone was wanted to operate the Radio Set in support of the coming invasion of Tannahera Bay and Hollandia by The Allies.

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No one knew how to operate a radio set except Captain Baramily himself, so he had to go. Again his death was faked in much the same manner as that of Jocelyn and as he was nearly starving and constantly ill with malaria the whole operation was quite credible and the Japanese were glad to get rid of him as the Captain was always confronting the Japanese on behalf of his men.

Back in the Kurelu village it was Jocelyn’s turn to nurse Captain Baramily back to life and they became good friends so happy were they to have found each other that they soon began to recite to each other the Poetry of Kabir and of Saint John of The Cross. Jocelyn at first was shy and wanted to dress more coyly but Captain Baramily explained to her that it would be better if she continued to go about naked as the other women did least in case the Japanese might surprise them she would be recognized as a foreigner and be taken back into captivity.

The truth was that Jocelyn was a bit taken by this handsome and gentlemanly Hindu who could recite Kabir, recount to her eloquently the teachings of The Guru Nanak and communicate to her in vivid images the beauty of The Sacred Lotus Pool of Amritsar as it looked at night illuminated by the torch lights of the devotees at the festivals. By the fire of their own hearth, they had started the healing process that had brought them together in the hut they shared at night, under the stars, in those beautiful mountains overlooking the Sea. She no longer felt that excruciating pain on her anus; on the contrary, she felt a tickling sensation of pleasure when Ravi approached her and she gave in to him and let him kiss her and embrace her.

In the morning he said to her: ‘My beautiful blue-eyed Dravidian who has been pigmented black.’

‘If it hadn’t been for General Kitazano we would never have met.’ She got up and exposed her full figure.

‘What are you doing, darling?’

‘I am performing my morning toilet.’

It was true, she had bathed many times in the streams of the Cyclops Mountains, been drenched by the cool rain often enough and yet the dark brown pigment of the causarina fruit mixed with areka juice remained. She liked it. She had gone native, her secret wish all along since her days in Batavia teaching at the girls’ school; she had loved the golden color of her graceful, slender Javanese pupils, the teen age daughters of Javanese and Balinese merchants.

Ravi went about naked too, with his tamarind cock sheaf and a native net bag to wrap around his long Sikhs hair, his only garments. He had become friends with chief Nilik and been given a spear and the late Ralph Toussier’s sub-machine gun, a British Sten gun with cartridges. Several of chief Nilik’s men were armed with Japanese discarded weapons so that they were in effect a New Guinea guerrilla band operating in the Cyclops Mountains preparing for the coming invasion of Hollandia and Tanhamera Bay by the Allied Forces.

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Chief Nikil as a young man and with Australian planter and coast watcher Ralph Toussier During the foreign intervention of 1941-1945 in the Lake Sentani area.

3

Back in The Island of New Georgia the campaign was over, General Hester had been sacked for incompetence and the airport at Munda taken. The company was celebrating and preparing the invasion of New Guinea. They were at ‘Pappy’ Kessing’s Officers Club in Tulagi in what had been the Anglican Bishop of Micronesia’s ‘cathedral’ now turned into the US Navy’s advanced base recreational center for Guadalcanal. The genius of ‘Pappy’ Kessing was that he had been a bartender before the War and that he continued to be a bartender during the War. Lieutenant John Fitzgerald Kennedy was talking with Lieutenant Commander Elihu Bent about their old days at Harvard when Admirals ‘Pug’ Ainsworth and ‘Tip’ Merrill came in to have a drink with Admirals Tom Wilkinson and ‘Uncle Joe’ Barbey. Captain ‘Pappy’ Kessing was serving drinks at the bar, glass in hand he roared with pleasure: ‘To the victors of Kolonbangara!!’

‘Wait for us, ‘Pappy’, we ain’t yet debarked’ said ‘Pug’.

Some never came back, thought ‘Tip’ Merrill to himself, remembering the men of Helena who had drowned.

‘Uncle Dan’ and Tom Wilkinson had just flown in from Nouméa where they had been conferring with Admiral Halsey and his Staff preparing for the coming ‘Operation Reckless’ code name for the invasion of Hollandia and Tanahmerah Bay. Lt. General Richard L. Eichelberger was to command the landing force of 50 000 men and he, Daniel Barbey, was to command the 200 ships involved in the affair.

As the admirals went out with their drinks into the cool fresh air of the night ‘Pappy’ Kessing called out Harvard Historian Elihu Bent aside: 70

‘Wanna see you at the woodshed tonight, Ely’ ‘Sure thing, Pappi.’

Ely was regularly ‘taken to the woodshed’; it seemed that she had become docile, bent dawn, and Pappi did whatever he pleased with her.

Back at the Cyclops Mountains near the foot of Gunung Ifar, its highest peak, a troop of Kurelus led

by Nikil and Ravi was on the move through the jungle trails looking for a new place to camp far from Japanese patrols, somewhere overlooking the sea where they could place the radio antenna. They were all chewing areca nuts and spitting the red juice on the ground, this gave them strength and pleasure. The men and women carried great bundles in their fiber net bags, all their worldly possessions, they were transporting to their new camp high up on the mountains. Jocelyne was leading her two adopted children by the hands and they in turn were carrying one piglet each.

The two large net bags she carried itched her bare shoulders and the string of her girdle strap was rubbing against her labia tickling her pleasantly, reminding her of lovemaking with Ravi, so that the chewing of areca and this pleasant sensation made her fatigue bearable as it did most of the other women, her companions, who effortlessly, it seemed to her, followed their men. She was now thoroughly integrated to the band and loved by all for herself as an able and hardworking homemaker and as the companion of Ravi who was popular among the men for his athletic endurance, good humor and savvy in all ways mechanical dealing with the modern world that The Kerules in their innocence and love of the natural world ignored.

4

A powerful fleet was being assembled by Giles Downing at the planning board. From his command in USS Hornet he oversaw the invasion of Jayapura, giving long range support from his carrier force, they would blast the Japanese at Humbolt Bay and the Lake Sentani airfields.

He had been fucked by a Brit, a Lord at that, and he had liked it, he knew no shame, but his sense of honor and self-confidence had been shattered. And he raged. He raged at himself and he raged at his men uncontrollably because he could not forgive himself that he was a faggot and liked it. So he started making the life miserable of young ensigns that he found wanting… punishing them for minor infractions until his second in command and senior officers could take it no longer and wrote a letter to Admiral Halsey signed by most of the senior staff of the USS Hornet.

Halsey had no choice notwithstanding his love and admiration for Giles whom he considered a military genius for the way he had handled affairs at the Battle of Midway when he had gone dawn himself with an acute case of dermatitis and Spruance had taken nominal command. All knew it had been Giles who had handled the show at Midway, steadied by Spruance, who was such a staunch, good fellow, a very capable sailor as he later showed at the Battle of The Philippine Sea. But he, “Bull” Halsey, who was the pride of the pacific fleet, had to throw his friend Giles, to the wolves: Secretary Frank Knox and his own Chief, Admiral Ernest King, who both hated Giles Downing’s guts because he was a braggart and was always challenging ‘higher authority’.

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So “Uncle Dan” and Tom Wilkinson gathered the fleet, they sortied Ulithi Lagoon in The Marianas and headed towards Hollandia with 200 ships. The Landing at Tamaherah Bay bogged down; there was a snap, a swamp not thirty yards from the shore, impracticable for vehicles which had to be reembarked; all this the result of faulty intelligence, in part due to the untimely death of Australian coast watcher, planter Ralph Toussieur up in the Cyclops Mountains. So that during the night of March 23, 1944 Ravi and Nikil had to slip into Tamaherah Bay undetected by the Japanese who were lurking in ambush along the Lake Sentani-Tamaherah Bay Trail, to warn an Australian scouting party led by Lieutenant G.C. Harris of the Royal Australian Navy of the presence of a hostile tribe in the vicinity which was in league with the Japanese.

But they were late and lieutenant Harris was ambushed by the Japanese that night after landing on the beach, he and four of his men were killed, but another six escaped and were led by Ravi and Nikil into the jungle and up to the Kurele camp at the foot of Mount Gunung-Ifar were they hid until the landing of General Irving’s troops on April 22.

Meanwhile the Australian Rangers and Kerule warriors scouted the Lake Sentani trail and reported to General Irving when he landed and thus were able to serve as guides to the troops of two regiments of the 24th Division who fought their way almost in single file along the difficult trail that led to Lake Sentani, meeting small groups of Japanese who fought a hard rear gourd action until caught from behind by elements of the 41st Division making their way from Lake Sentani.

On D-Day, April 23, General MacArthur debarked at Tanaherah Bay from cruiser Nashville accompanied by his staff and by Admiral Barbey and was acquainted with the situation and agreed with General Krueger to shift the bulk of the operation to Humbolt Bay and Hollandia as the beaches there showed more promise of a swift redeployment.

As the invasion force approached on their landing craft they saw fires burning on the beach near Hollandia village. This was an aviation gas dump that had been ignited the previous day by the retreating Japanese, who contrary to their established costume, had fled into the jungle. In and around the smoke rising from the sandy beach and the burning petrol there appeared some figures clad in white, some wore turbans and waved white flags. Who were they?

They turned out to be part of a company of Sikhs who had fought at Singapore along with a group of nuns and missionaries of various nationalities; they were the remnants of Captain Baramily’s Sikhs and nearly 125 nuns and missionaries from several countries that had survived interment in a Japanese prisoners of war camp. They were told by their captors to ‘flee into the jungle and save themselves from the bombardment that was to follow’. But they had gone to the beach to await the invasion forces. While they were there, waiting for the Allies, a lone Japanese plane had appeared and strafed an ammunition dump and gasoline depot abandoned by the fleeing Japanese and it had then ignited a tremendous fire that was seen from the advancing landing boats of the invading fleet.

Indeed, when the invading forces arrived, the Japanese provisions stacked on the beach, along with unused aviation gas, left behind after the destruction of nearly all the Japanese Planes caught sitting on those same fields laboriously built by slave labor; were still burning fiercely, creating a huge commotion along the beaches, with continuing explosions of ammunition crates that lasted several days before the newly debarked allied troops were able to put out the conflagration. But before the 72

entire party of Sikhs, nuns and missionaries could be repatriated to their respective countries of origin they were slowly nursed back to life from their sad state of malnourishment and ill treatment by their Japanese captors. Their former captors uncharacteristically for Japanese troops, it must be said, absconded into the jungle, there to meet an unenviable fate, as they attempted a retreat to their bases up North in New Guinea; they died of starvation or were killed by the natives who ambushed them along the way when they were too weak to oppose any resistance.

5

Captain Baramily was co-opted into the Australian Rangers by Captain Collins of RAN Warramunga in view of his special abilities as liaison with The Kureles and the other tribes in The Cyclops Mountains and around Lake Sentani. He was given the regular khaki shorts and vest with insignia of the Australian Army although he much better preferred to go about naked with his bamboo cock sheaf which he did when he was alone with his tribe’s people.

The Ursuline Sisters had already reported the ‘death’ of Sister Jocelyn of Courtenay to the Mother Superior at Batavia, which in a sense was true, and was for the better since Jocelyn had decided to stay in Hollandia and become a teacher and nurse to the local children. She wanted to live with Ravi who was a civil engineer; he wanted to stay with her and live in Hollandia were he hoped to lend his services as an engineer, as he rightly foresaw the great potential of the place as the future Capital of the Jayapura Regency of New Guinea.

Within a few days, a Quonset Village was created by the Marine Corps of Engineers in a beautiful grove overlooking Lake Sentani, a little above Cyclops Air Field. This compound later became General Douglas MacArthur´s Head Quarters until after the Philippine Campaign when he moved to Manila.

Jocelyn stayed with the Kerules in The Cyclops Mountains until Ravi found a place for them in the new village of Hollandia that was being settled in Challenger Cove on Humboldt Bay. So that by the end of June of 1944 they were living in a spacious palm thatched hut with big open doors and big windows atop a hill that had a magnificent view of Humboldt Bay. Ravi had made friends with a certain Captain James Potter Conover Jr. of US Navy transport Orizaba, whom he had met at the officers club over drinks. The “officers club” at Hollandia consisted of ‘a cluster of army tents which had been pitched on platforms laid on the pilings of a native village evacuated by The Dutch. It was on the edge of a coral reef and accessible only by boat’. Captain Conover had been living in Mexico where he had married a Mexican Lady, he had lived in the Philippines for many years and in Peru and hoped to live in Mexico after the war. So Ravi invited him over to the hut the next day when Captain Conover arrived bearing an apple pie and some chocolate ice cream wrapped in ice courtesy of the canteen of The Orizaba.

Jocelyn borrowed a Chinese silk dress for the occasion from the wife of a local merchant and bathed in the little stream behind the house. Captain Conover spoke in French to her and told her how his parents had lived in France not far from La Gacilly in Normandy where Jocelyn had grown. And they 73

had ice cream and apple pie and the three of them were transported to their distant homes as they saw the sun set over Humboldt Bay. The Captain told them about Acapulco Bay and Mexico, the whole evening being a balsamic experience for their souls amid the strife and violence of War. Some three miles from Hollandia village at a place called Hamadi, near Pancake hill, an English Doctor, Margaret Obaldistone and an Australian nurse, Julia Orwell, had established a field hospital on what had once been a “soccer field” by the sea. This was intended to service the ‘Natives’ as the Allied Forces had other installations in Sentani and in Hospital ships anchored in Humboldt Bay. And there Jocelyn went to offer her services and she was warmly welcomed by the staff who were sorely in need of help.

So Jocelyn, who was experienced with children, was placed to manage the ‘Nursery’ which was an open tent in the palm grove by the sea adjacent to the field hospital staffed by young girls of the Lake Sentani area who ministered to local children, cured them, fed them and played with them.

Ravi worked with a Council of local Chiefs in what he referred to as ‘sanitation and public works’, the nucleus of what would eventually become the civil administration of the future Lake SentaniHollandia Area.

Margaret and Julia became very curious about Jocelyn, they were all of similar age: ‘So you are the French nun who is living with Captain Baramily,’said Julia Orwell.

‘Yes, I am, but no longer a nun.’

‘Isn’t it, ‘once a nun always a nun’…

‘Not really, not in my case’ ‘You lost your calling...

‘Let us say that I found love’... she smiled.

‘A worldly love’….

‘Yes, a worldly love.’

‘Congratulations’, said Margaret Obaldistone sincerely, who had been observing Jocelyn very intently.

‘Thank you’ ‘You were at the prison camp, weren’t you…?’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘Where did you said you were from in France?’

‘La Gacilly, in Normandie’.

‘I know a parfumier who is from there, Monsieur Ives Rocher.’

‘Yes, he is my uncle.’

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‘Then you must be Baroness de Courtenay’.

‘I am’.

‘I knew your brother, Eustace, in Paris.’

‘And was he charming…

‘Yes, very charming…

‘I am glad’.

‘You never told me about Eustace’, put in Julia Orwell.

‘Well, I don’t tell you everything, do I….

‘No, I guess you don’t’, answered Julia with a smile.

That evening they shared their lunch sitting in the sand under the palm trees.

After lunch Jocelyn asked her new-found friends: ‘How did you get here?’

‘We are WRENS, Women’s Royal Naval Service. I am a lieutenant and Julia is my staff sergeant.

General MacArthur likes us and he had us deployed here because there is going to be a big base here. I am from Stirling in Scotland, studied Medicine in Edinburgh and Julia is from Sydney, Australia and is a registered nurse.’

A young, lanky, man with a grin on his face was approaching the group, his shirt was opened showing his chest, he was barefoot walking on the sand with his boots tied by the laces hanging from his shoulder.

‘Well, its Jack!’ exclaimed Julia Orwell with delight. It was John Kennedy, the PT Boat Lieutenant.

Jack came over and sat with the girls. He was still grinning broadly.

‘Well, you ladies having lunch?’

‘Yeah, this is our new friend, Jocelyn, she used to be a nun…

‘Not anymore?

‘No, she absconded with a Sikh… said Julia mischievously.

‘Is that true? Asked Jack still smiling, now facing Jocelyn.

‘Yes, it is, we were together in the Japanese camp and he saved my life’… Jocelyn told the company how it had been done, how she had been taken to Nikil’s camp. Jack Kennedy’s expression changed, filled with admiration as it sank in him the reality of what he had just heard. ‘She’s got no influential father to procure her a Purple Heart’ thought Kennedy.

‘And you are French, I presume. Where did you learn English…?

‘At Newham in London with the Ursuline Sisters of Saint Angela Merici.’

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‘I know girls from Boston who studied at New Rochelle College in New York. I am from Boston, we are Catholic, but I studied at a Protestant School called Choate (where the present author visited with the Saint Paul’s School track team in 1962).

‘How’s your back, Jack, will you be needing some therapy?’ asked Julia.

‘Guess I will.’

‘Come right over to the tent.’ Jack and Julia got up and walked over to the field hospital, Margaret and Jocelyn followed.

That same evening after sunset, Jack, Julia and Margaret went out for a swim, naked together, in the beach at Challenger Cove, while Jocelyn and Ravi made love in their cabin.

5

Come September there was a great gathering of Chiefs at Lake Sentani. Chester Nimitz flew in from Honolulu, General MacArthur returned in Nashville to Hollandia on September 17. “Ping” Willkinson and Dan Barbey, the two master strategists of amphibious warfare, arrived together by plane with their plans for the Leyte show. Halsey and his top dog, Giles Downing, also came. Harvard Historian and Franklin Roosevelt friend, Elihu Bent, was there. “Scrappy” Kessing, of course was there because he was the official base Commander and master of ceremonies. And there was “Harry, The Horse” Liversedge who at six feet six was the tallest man in the company, was awarded the highest naval decoration for outstanding gallantry in the conduction of The New Georgia Campaign.

After the conference more medals were awarded for valor and for distinguished service. An esplanade in front of the large Quonset conference building had been prepared with local shrubbery and flowers giving the whole setting the appearance of a park in front of the magic panorama of lake Sentani with its many Islands, palm beaches and surrounding hills covered with dense, luxuriant jungle and imposing tropical vegetation.

Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur did the honors: Jack Kennedy got a ‘purple heart’ for valor, for swimming countless miles ferrying his wounded comrades to safety and for his back injury when he landed on his back after Destroyer Amagiri jack knifed his PT 109. Captain Montgomery Cliff also got a Purple Heart for his rear action at The Dragon’s Peninsula during The Munda Campaign.

Captain Ravindhra Baramilly received a ‘purple heart’ for valor shown during the ambuscades on the Lake Sentani –Tamaherah trail and for his courageous behavior as leader of the prisoners during their stay at the Japanese detention camp. For this last, he was asked to say some words on behalf of those who died and on behalf of planter Ralph Toussier who was awarded a Medal of Honor posthumously.

Ravindrah stated simply that he had been deeply moved by the dramatic events of the war, which had suddenly overtaken him like so many other youths; and here he mentioned the Sisters of the Ursuline Order who had been his companions at the Camp and been thrown into the turmoil and commotion of War and had ministered with such devotion to the wounded and dying, while being 76

so unexpectedly abused, innocent as they were of the travails of human affairs. He had originally volunteered as a recently graduated civil engineer from Lahore and Rawalpindi into the Indian Army.

He went on to mention as an example, the valor shown by Sister Jocelyn de Courtenay at all times during her captivity and afterwards in the village of chief Nilik, who in his opinion were more meritorious than he and to whom he pledged to deliver his medal.

At this last there were stirrings of admiration as General MacArthur turned to Admiral Nimitz commenting to this effect, and asked Chief Nikil and Joselyn to step forward and be given a ribbon and have their names notated in the citation. This they did, Jocelyn in togs courtesy of The WRENS and Nikil in shorts provided by the Australian Army but with no shirt and no boots, showing his tattoos and tribal head dress of Bird of Paradise feathers.

In the evening just before sunset there was a reception were the recipients and the top brass gathered to relax with drinks and assorted available snacks. Captain Conover had been invited by Admiral Wilkinson and historian Bent who had both been pupils of his father, the Reverend James Potter Conover at Saint Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, and who had known him as a boy there. He was also a friend of Admiral Nimitz with whom he had served in USS Augusta when that Cruiser had been The Flag Ship of The Pacific Fleet. Admiral Nimitz had been the Captain and Captain Conover had been Chief Engineer. There too were Ravi and Jocelyn who were now his friends and some others like Admirals Daniel Barbey and Wilkinson who had recommended him because of his experience in Peru to be the War time Naval Attaché in Mexico City where he had lived between 1941 and 1943.

So they all reminisced, and had drinks and enjoyed the sun set over Lake Sentani until Captain Downing exchanged strong words and started a brawl with Captain Lord Ashburn to the amazement of the whole gathering. Captain Downing had called Captain Ashburn: “Faggot”, and there had been a commotion unheard of in the annals of the US Navy. Captain “Scrappy” Kessing restrained Lord Ashburn, who called Downing a drunk and wanted to come to blows with him. Fortunately, the Generals and The Admirals were in a different part of the park and had not noticed the scuffle, otherwise they would have court martialed Downing there and then. “Scrappy” Kessing and Captain Montgomery Cliff restrained Downing; they then took both to a secluded area of the compound inside a wood shed where they had it out in a fist fight in which Giles Downing came out the worst.

Bill Halsey who had gotten wind of the affair came over and had Giles reconciled with Lord Ashburn on the spot. Giles had started crying and embraced Ashburn who very gallantly took Giles apart and said: ‘Giles, you’ve got to accept things the way they are otherwise you’ll go nuts, you’ll destroy yourself.’

They went out together into the dark of the jungle near the shores of Lake Sentani, and there in the shade of a palm tree, under the moon light, Giles went down on Ashburn: the Cyclops and the oneeyed midget; and then they kissed.

Later that night, Giles, still drunk, was quietly taken aboard a jeep to Sentani Air Field and whisked off in a fighter plane aboard Hornet.

Meanwhile a bon fire was light by the shore of Lake Sentani and the company gathered by torch light to see the Kurele warriors do a war dance while the Admirals and Generals drank whiskey and talked of the coming invasion of The Philippines.

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Next day Captain Conover, Ravi, Jocelyn, Nikil, John Kennedy, Julia Orwell, Dr. Margaret Obaldistone, Captain Montgomery Cliff, Larry Croft, “Pappy� Kessing and Elihu Bent gathered together in front of the field hospital near Pancake Beach, for a last swim and a modest picnic of jamoke and sandwiches before they parted company in search of their own individual destinies.

Letter of Admiral Nimitz to the author on the occasion of his birth.

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USS Augusta, Northampton-class Heavy Cruiser, flagship of the Asiatic Fleet. My father was Chief Engineer from October 1933 to April 1935 when Admiral Chester W. Nimitz was the Captain of this famous heavy cruiser which at one time or another hosted President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Prime Minister Winston Churchill and King George VI. The Augusta participated in the landings at Normandy and was at the Battle of Casablanca where it exchanged gunfire with the French Battleship Jean Barth.

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USS Orizaba, my father was Captain of this ship making several transpacific voyages carrying troops from ports in California to Australia, New Zealand, The Philippines and the Aleutian Islands during 1944 and 1945.

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USS S-29, my father was Captain of this submarine in 1924-1925 cruising in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage out of New London, Connecticut and later in the Pacific Ocean, based in Hawaii and Olongapo in the Philippines.

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Presidential Yatch USS Mayflower. My father served aboard this ship in 1926-1927 as First Lieutenant Gunnery Officer and Aide to The White House. In the above photograph of the ship’s company my father is third from right of the seated officers. This ship had a colorful history under many guises and was one of the longest serving vessels in the US Navy, from the Spanish-American War to the Second World War and service in the Israeli Navy. (see article in Wikipedia, USS Mayflower).

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USS Hatfield, (variant of Clemson-class Destroyer), my father was the Executive Navigator of this ship between 1928 and 1930. He was then a Lieutenant Commander.

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USS Trenton (Tennessee-class armored Cruiser). My father served in this ship in 1926 as aid to the Executive Officer and as Chief Officer of the Watch (notice camouflage paint during WWII in this old four stack ship).

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USS Seattle (originally, USS Washington), a survivor of the iron clad era (notice the port batteries, the guns being under the deck inside the ship, and the four chimneys for the coal burning steam engines). This was the first ship my father served in, fresh from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1917; transporting troops to France during The First World War where his brother, Richard Stevens Conover, aged 20, was killed at the Battle of The Somme that same year. In this photograph of 1908 near Seattle, you can see the Olympic Mountains in the distance.

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USS Black Hawk, Destroyer tender, my father was CO, chief executive officer of this Conradian ship of the old Asiatic Fleet during 1935-1036. The Black Hawk saw action at the Battle of Balikpapan of the East coast of Borneo on 7 December 1941. It was one of the few surviving ships that hightailed to the Port of Darwin in 24 November 1942, a few days before the Japanese Conquest of Java. It is shown here in Philippine waters in 19 December 1935 when my father was CO. Notice the canvas tops over the decks to ward the crew from the tropical heat in what were in effect working areas with machine tools servicing destroyers in the Philippine Sea. The ship acted as repair shop and home depot for visiting Destroyers in need.

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Admiral Alfie Johnston USN, condecorating Almirante Coello of the Mexican Navy, on the grounds of the American Embassy in Mexico City in 1943. General George Marshall is standing on the right and my father, who was US Naval AttachĂŠ in Mexico at the time (1941-1943), is standing on the left.

(General George Marshall was the Chief of all the Allied Armies during World War II, along with President Frankling Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill).

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THE CAT WOMAN OF PARIS OR THE SECRET OF THE RUE SERPENT

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Take it as a fact that the Rue Serpent exists, snakes its way into La Seine. It did exist as I hurried along its course on my way to Niesluchowski’s. Never did I guess that Niesluchowski had once tried to become a priest, or that Holy Cross College was a Jesuit Seminary. I hold an unfair advantage over George and it is that I found things about him that he did not tell me himself; when such a thing happens one is free to abuse the information so obtained as one pleases; it being the product of another’s omissions, of circumstance, of causality. On the other hand I abused his generosity on more than one occasion, but it was only slightly and it was among friends.

Other friends would sometimes gather at Niesluchowski’s and each, in his own way, had per force to face the perils of the Rue Serpent. I always chose to go quickly for fear that the old timbers holding the walls of the old houses would give and that the rule of fate would abjure against me erroneously and let loose those unquiet walls that had witnessed so much sedition. A nefarious gray, the color of true death were these walls only restrained in their wickedness and evil intent by lengths of equally hideous beams stretched to preposterous heights with the sole pretense of averting Time, and time curiously indulgent, waved each passer-by at his own risk.

The Arabs idling by actually lived somewhere in the street. I could not tell where, in The Prophets name, did they find their habitation. They had the sullen countenance of perjurers expurgating some transgression. Whether political or some other tinged with indiscretion I should not tell, but doubtless, it was penance. Bereft of palm trees and deserts, the Arabs stood menacingly by their store fronts, not always consenting ransom, demanding Baraka, only occasional releasing a bottle of Algerian wine at a bitter price. The fact was that we needed the Arabs and they knew it.

Of the goings on at Niesluchowski’s place I should not tell. The open shower in the middle of the kitchen singularly occupied by a beautiful young girl while Niesluchowski cooked dinner. Miles Davis, Cannon Ball Aderley, John Coltrane playing The Concert of Aranjuez. And that incredulous black room, the color of true death, with the ceiling invisible in the darkness. The monstrous wooden table, heavy, old and cursed, reeking of wine, left over from the time of Louis Phillippe Egalité, with Mackluhans Gutemberg Galaxy opened at page one.

There were days when that room was full of ghosts and other people, Jean Valjean and the ghosts of 1848, Niesluchowski and the ghosts of 1968. At other times I was there alone with my thoughts.

Still on other occasions I would lie beside a girl who had the power of paralyzing the blood inside my body- Humbert Humbert’s daughter, she who made the most satiated ghosts of Paris livid with desire; she whose sole presence choked the breath, and who burned the memory of her thighs, who drank our hearts, who shattered the glass of our illusions, who danced and danced and was suddenly gone…

Oh, what a melancholic house! What a melancholic street! What a melancholic City! But then, one day, I decided to accept her invitation, The Cat Woman of Paris!

She lived at the bottom of the stairs. Too many things happen in Paris when one is young and the heart is yet strong… confident, audacious and transparent. She was always dressed in black, The Cat Woman of Paris. And when I saw her she always smiled as she stood by her door. ‘bon soir, jeune homme’, she would shriek in a barely audible moan. Her face was white, wax white with ash, like the face of an indefinitely aged Transylvanian Madonna living an unnatural life in the sewers of Paris.

She always wore a black lace mantilla over her head, and she grinned and her story was in more 90

than one way immaterial. She did not have a past, not a present nor a future; not bound to Earth Heaven or Hell, but to that infamous house. Why? I know not.

At last, one day, she invited me in. I remember the light of day filtering through the rectangular frame of the front door, coming in as it were through that black entrance from that repugnant street to those black stairs that I knew so well. She sat by the trap door that lead underground beneath those stairs‌ and invited me in. Perhaps she sensed in me something: that of all of Niesluchowski’s guests, I was ready. Perhaps it was something else; perhaps she liked me.

She bade me light a candle and then I followed, the light of the candle illuminating he way. In Paris, in 1968, the battle raging, we drank uncounted glasses of wine each day, and throughout them all, I was always lucid. I say this in simple humility. It was a fact. And she sensed it; otherwise she would not have invited me to her home. The stone stairs were unexpectedly well cut, and so was the vaulted roof, impeccably fitted. There was great lapidary intelligence here, very ancient, monolithic.

The powerful energy of that symmetry cut my mind like a swift current of damp air; the flame of the candle flickered and almost, I dare say, did my courage flicker. And yet she drew me on, and that cool symmetry drew me on, and they sustained my courage.

Finally we arrived at a level ground of damp earth. Water was dripping from a dark ceiling and there were large puddles ahead. We avoided these. I lifted the candle high over my head, her full figure was outlined looking at me with large red eyes and a smile deeper than pain concealed by a merry face. High over our heads I beheld a vaulted ceiling of large convex stones and lo! A forest of rectangular pillars everywhere merging with the penumbra as far as the light could reach. We walked a short distance leaving pillars behind, nearing La Seine, advancing through the dark, within a circle of light, until we came to an awesome, most fearful sight. Most incongruously, imposing themselves, there were an ancient brass bed, a chest, a high backed chair, a table, and on the table glasses and a bottle of wine, extant as if in the stage of a dark and fantastic dream.

And as if awakening from a dream, dozens upon dozens of fierce shinning eyes. Scores of cats awaited our coming. She lit several candles and then sat on the bed draping herself with the black embroidered mantilla. I sat on the chair. She offered me a glass of wine. I took the wine. And then she reclined on the bed and looked at me triumphantly. The light of the candles shone on the ceiling, on the cool monoliths of stone; it cast an unholy glow on the puddles by the earthen floor and on the eyes of the felines glowing intensely, acknowledging their Queen, for so she was their Queen!

In perfect symbiosis, drawing strength from her subjects, equidistant in their obeisance and adoration.

Her eyes seemed to glow with a joyous force that chilled my blood yet fascinated me. I lifted my cup and drained the wine. Every cat seemed to have a mind of its own, and that one mind was searching my own, juggling with my interior, measuring my terror, curious, indifferent, transposing, and transfixing my eye. I, at last managed to avoid their collective stare, to fall once more into her eyes.

And how she glowed, this woman! Like a cat, a cat, indeed, she had become, abandoned by mankind who raged above in savage strife. She had become a royal female cat surrounded by a court of suitors. We sat there for a space staring at each other, silent, in her light.

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Outside the Arabs looked at me in despair for I had learned the secret of the Rue Serpent- and nothing would be the same from then on. They became submissive and polite, they delivered the wine; they no longer stood insolently by their storefronts demanding Baraka.

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ALICE

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I was driving around in my old Datsun when I saw this gorgeous girl standing in the middle of Revolución Avenue in front of The Convent of El Carmen in San Angel. She gave me a lovely smile and I reciprocated and asked her to come inside which she did. She was tall and very beautiful, golden skinned like a Polynesian princess, with a mouth so warm and full, and a pair of golden, laughing, sparkling eyes like a couple of gold fish swimming in a luminous coral pool.

The first thing that she did is that she took out from her bag this fat, long joint. Lit it and passed it on. We took a big puff and began one of the loveliest friendships of our blessed lives. Her name was Alice and she was at the time nineteen or thereabouts. I was twenty-four in 1972.

After smoking the joint we went to my place and made love. I was then in my parents’ house in San Angel in a handsome apartment that had a loft. We had everything we needed, she brought along her bag, her oil painting kit, and a long silver flute, a piccolo I believe.

So as I was saying, we climbed to the loft and I undressed her and she undressed me and we made love with unexampled tenderness as if we had known each other for thousands of years and had just met again after several lifetimes.

She said she had been a shepherdess in the hill country of Queretaro. That she had ran away from home at the age of twelve, come to Mexico City and been educated by a savvy prostitute who later introduced her to the Taller de la Gráfica Popular, the one founded by José Guadalupe Posada where she had become a model and been taught, History of Art, design and painting.

I then told her about myself and we made love with renewed vigor. Towards the end of this lovely coitus, intertwined in sweet embrace, extenuated, our mouths pecking lovingly at each other, we decided to live together. So we got dressed and went to her grandparents’ house where she was then living to get her things.

I remember her grandparents sitting together in two tiny wooden chairs sunning themselves in the little garden of their house surrounded by their huajolotes. Alice was very proud of her grandparents, especially of her grandfather who ‘had never spent a single day of his life in jail and he was nearing eighty’. A remarkable feat in Mexico for a lifelong campesino who having no connections, no power and no money are invariably invited to guest in one of the many jail houses of the Republic for whatever reason alone.

Her grandparents lived in the hills beyond San Angel in a place called San Bernabé. Their house was a lovely cottage with the rural flavor of the country side, with a bugambilia in bloom over the veranda, flower pots hanging under the eaves, chickens and grandchildren milling around the patio.

Alice introduced me to her sister Pueblito, her aunt Josefina and her grandparents. She packed her things while she happily rapped with her sister and aunt and I kept her grandparents company; this remarkable couple who sat in perfect harmony after God knows how many decades of living together. They were happy and they sensed our happiness.

I put Alice’s suitcase in the trunk of the Datsun and we drove off, well wished like a couple of newlyweds.

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First thing we did was to go to the Taller de la Gráfica Popular because Alice wanted me to meet her teacher and friends. Actually she wanted me to see a huge oil painting of herself laying naked on a divan which they kept in the main engraving room of The Taller.

Her friends were very happy to see us, I realized how much they loved this woman and how happy they were to see her with a ‘guerito’ like myself, none of them even seemed jealous. We all loved the girl because she sparkled and shone with magnificent candor and everything she did and said was lovely and made everyone she met feel happy. She was a marvel, she was their creation, she was a nineteen year old self-made marvel from the hills of Queretaro and she was bringing me to them.

Next we went to La Opera, a bar on 20 de Noviembre Street near the Bellas Artes Opera House, this is a grand old place, a relic of Don Porfirio’s time decorated in vintage Art Nuveau with high ceilings, with gargoyle rafters, walls covered with finely carved woodwork and marble topped tables in the style of The Rue de La Paix or The Ramblas.

Alice was radiant, glowing; her lovely red mouth red and desirous, her eyes swimming in happiness, her gift to me. We had several excellent aged tequilas and then left to walk along Veinte de Noviembre Street towards the Alameda Park with our arms entwined around each other kissing shamelessly like lovers. I remember the street lamps on the Alameda, Los Faroles de La Alameda, glowing with a light that reached us all the way from La Belle Époque, abstracting us into a world shared only by lovers. Alice’s long silky black hair caressing my neck and her melodious voice telling me of the places she had been and where she evidently wanted me to take her again.

We got back to the loft in an exuberant mood and I remember I put “Kind of Blue” on the record player, my favorite record of the time with Miles Davies and John Coltrane playing The Concert of Aranjuéz. She unpacked her things and both of us, trembling, put her clothes atop mine, mixing her panties with my johns, her bras with my tee-shirts… We went to sleep in each other’s arms as if I had found a sister and she a brother, playmates and lovers.

Next morning the light of day streaming through the little window of the loft illuminated the wooden beams of the roof. I heard beautiful flute music streaming up towards the bedroom on the loft from below. I looked for Alice but she was not in bed. I got up and went dawn the sailing ship stairs and saw Alice in a long, white cotton dress sitting cross-legged on the thick woolen white rug by the fire place playing her silver flute.

She had been up since early, gone to the San Angel market, bought food and had prepared for me a cereal called ‘Granola’, delicious it was, first time I tasted it. I lifted her from where she sat and carried her to the loft, undressed her and made love to her until she screamed in mad delight.

After breakfast we went to meet some friends of mine at the practice stadium of the University City where they have a fine tartan track oval. Luis Perrano, Arturo Mujía and José Luis Alcatraz winced when they saw us arrive. The very lovely Marilú Alcatraz was delighted at the sight of Alice and when they both took of their sweat pants and showed their shapely legs we all got dawn to some serious workout. After some judicious exercise Luis Perrano, show off strut that he is, wanted to lead us in a two thousand meter race around the course, some five laps around the oval track.

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The fact was that that Alice took off her tennis shoes and shepherd girl that she was led the pack and beat us all at the finish line by about twenty yards. After the race, sitting on the grass gasping and open mouthed, myself included, we watched Alice standing on the track smiling at us as if she had gone on a stroll around a park. Luis Perrano rather pale and out of breath turned to me and said: ‘where did you meet this girl, Felipe’.

Luis Perrano thought that I should have a girl of my own class, La Haute Bourgeoisie, white skinned and with lots of money, preferably educated by the French Catholic Nuns of the Asunción School, someone who knew ‘everybody who counted in the best society of Mexico’. And Alice did not belong to this theory of ensembles. Such algebraic equations were beyond my computations. I believed in the richness of particular experience and in the dark beauty of sun drenched incandescent skin.

By the age of nineteen Alice had already been a shepherdess in the hills of Queretaro, an accomplished prostitute in the best brothels of Acapulco, a model and a student in the most distinguished atelier of Mexican engravers, a Maoist activist in the communes of the Sierra de Guerrero, an accomplished painter and musician and was besides an initiate in the Holy Mysteries of Huautla. She was also an extremely beautiful woman who happened to possess the golden skin of a Polynesian Queen and the golden candor of a serrana Queretana. This my good friend Luis Perrano did not understand so that he was distraught at being beaten in a foot race by a girl he considered to be his social inferior.

After our exercises in the playing fields of The University I took Alice to a place called “Jugolandia” near the San Angel Market. We each had a large glass of chilled natural orange and carrot juice sitting at a table with a parasol watching the world go by. Then we went home and showered together, tenderly doing sweet favors for each other, dressing each other in the clothes we chose for one another from our common store in the wardrobe of our loft.

We then drove dawn town to the street of Dolores to eat at Alice’s favorite Chinese restaurant.

Afterwards I took her to a small, exclusive clothes store in the street of Lopez. We went into a dressing room that had wall to wall mirrors. I told Alice to undress and then asked the shop girl to bring her a collection of silk mini dresses and exotic underwear, Alice chose a beautiful black mini dress with a set of matching wine colored silk and lace underwear.

She went out of the store dressed like this and we took a side street towards the Street of Madero leading into The Plaza de la Constitución. We saw the murals of Diego Rivera at the National Palace and as we were descending the stairs she whispered in my ear: ‘I love you; I cannot bear this love any longer, I most make love to you right now’. We walked across the Zocalo to the Gran Hotel de la Ciudad de México and there asked for a room with a view of the Cathedral and the National Palace. We undressed each other and laid for a long time together looking at each other’s eyes until we became one with the noise of The City and the tolling of the bells in the Cathedral’s tower.

Now that she is dead, gone, dead of pneumonia in a Spanish jail, I think of her as we were then, that moment, that magnificent woman, as I try to honor her with my poor words, so small and cold and old I feel. And yet I can feel her near me, she guides my hand and encourages me to write, and I feel again the ineffable warmth of the glow of her eyes and remember those joyous fragments of eternity that were ours, that we were granted in our time. When the bells tolled for you and for me, Alicia.

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That time we lived together for almost a month. I would write poetry and she would play the flute and paint trees uprooted and sailing up toward the sky as she had seen them in Huautla during the Eating of The Sacred Mushrooms.

I gave her a poem I had written in England in the spring of 1971 in the park of Magdalen College, Oxford.

I dreamed that a tree Embraced me To the immense jealousy Of humanity And he embraced me Because I loved him right

Spare, straight, steady With a few branches Reaching eloquently For the sky.

Tree so soft Swinging in the wind, Tree so strong Breathing in the air Aerial, terrestrial tree, Spatial tree Least your roots Release the Earth And you go sailing Through the sky.

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We saw our friends, we went to see Gloria Contreras dance in a Theater that was being held by a Moist Group called C.L.E.T.A. Then one day she began to get restless and say that she was distracting me from my work; that she would go to Acapulco and work in the brothel for Raquel. I pleaded with her to stay, that I would be her pillar, her law, that I would make her paint beautiful paintings and write beautiful music, for she was learning to read and write music. She said that I would get tired of her and that she must go. After this I could not force her to stay. So she left.

Some months later she wrote to say that she had rented a house in Acapulco and that I should come.

So I went to Acapulco with my friend Daniel Inclan and the painter and musician Federico Avila both had just returned from France after a stay of several years. They were going to camp in Pie de la Cuesta and I was going to see Alice.

When we got to Acapulco on the high road that goes around the Bay direct to Pie de la Cuesta we saw a man being killed in cold blood by four gunmen in front of about five hundred people. Nobody did anything. We just sat there inside our car and saw the man gunned dawn. He was still moving his fingers, by the side of the curve, when we rode past, very slowly, as there was a lot of traffic. The four gunmen coolly placed their automatic rifles inside rifle bags, got into their car and drove off.

We drove right behind them and noticed the license plates but could do nothing about it because the killers were the police themselves and the man must have been a guerrillero.

We got to Alice’s house late that night. We found a lot of people in the house. Alice greeted us and then took us to her room. In her room, on a table, she had several matrasses over Bunsen burners.

She was boiling marijuana and passing the vapors through some filters in order to collect a base that she was storing in Helena Rubinstein’s cold cream jars. The whole scene was kind of fantastic; she looked like a female medieval alchemist. She greeted us very warmly and offered us a joint in a rolling paper greased up in marijuana paste. We got fantastically stoned.

She then told us that the people in the house were guerrillas of Lucio Cabañas and that they were expecting a shipment of arms from Guatemala due at any moment. A middle-aged campesino wearing a sombrero came in and very serious had a short conversation with Alice. It was evident that she was in charge. She was directing the whole show! A Volkswagen Combi had just arrived and it was full of arms. The driver was a light skinned freckle faced young fellow who looked like a university student, he came over and asked Alice if we were safe. Yes, she said, we were quite safe so they began unloading some very large automatic rifles with small tripods and long belts of ammunition. It looked like War. I could not believe my eyes seeing a smiling Alice cool as a cucumber installed in a rather luxurious house in a fashionable district of Acapulco near the Yacht Club canning marijuana paste in Helena Rubinstein’s cold cream jars, arranging for the delivery of some heavy military equipment for the militia of the liberated zone of The Sierra de Guerrero. And as I sit here at home thirty years later, in the same house where we lived, finishing this story, I realize fully who you were, Alice. I love you and remember you and I want other people to know who you were.

Then she put on this record Blond on Blond of Bob Dylan that I had given her in Mexico City and we had a party there in her room with the campesinos of Lucio Cabañas while the freckle faced student was unloading the arms, just as if we had been her guests at late night party in a fashionable sea side terrace overlooking the Bay of Acapulco.

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Which in fact we were.

Later on the same night, before the sun rose we went to the roof of the house to have another puff and watched the lights of the Port and sleep there in the cool breeze of the night.

Next morning before we left, Alice gave us a jar of Helena Rubinstein’s cold cream as a present.

A few months later Alice arrived at my house in Mexico City driving a Volkswagen Beetle. She looked as happy and as healthy as ever. She seemed indestructible, nothing could touch her. She told me that she had been working with Raquel but that she was fed up and had decided to come over to see me. She gave me some beautiful hand printed shirts as a present and a painting she had done of a group of ‘costeñas’ in the manner of Gaugin.

I carried her up to the loft and undressed her and was very gentle with her for hours. That night we made love in many ways, sometimes in the sitting position with the moonlight streaming through the little window of the loft. She was very tender and very affectionate and I realized how much I loved her and sensed what a big hole she had in her heart and how much she wanted me to fill it.

I told her never to leave me again and she said that she never would. We spent the whole next day in bed caressing and making love in a gentle, never ending, fashion.

In the afternoon we dressed because she told me that she was going to take me to meet ‘her real mother’. I took her to dinner at the Japanese Club in Las Aguilas. We ate a huge bowl of Suki-yake and drank several jars of Sake.

Later in her car, in the parking lot of the Club, we had a puff which nearly put me out of commission; it was such strong stuff that she always brought from the coast.

She was enjoying herself hugely and so was I, with that marvelous smile of hers which was her banner in life- she insisted that she was going to drive and that I should relax and enjoy the music.

She put on some tape of Pink Floyd and we drove into the night entranced, ethereal, in a dream world of our own, I stretched out beside her with the back of my seat reclined, we drove on and on through the night, under the city lights, under a full sky filled with stars in the time before the darkness, before an evil age set the pallor of smog ridding over us all… over the City that we loved… it must have been 1975.

At length we arrived somewhere and alighted from the car. I could hardly walk, I was so stoned. We entered a house into what seemed a garage and climbed up a vertical wooden ladder up through a hole on the roof into an apartment of the most curious disposition where some people were waiting for us.

It was a short man who greeted us, a bit thin but of an excellent disposition and temper with a rather gallant sense of humor, he must have been in his late forties or early fifties, I do not recall his name.

He was painting an incredible painting with great gusto and feeling, it was a many-colored mandala, a succession of aspirin tablets, going to infinity through all the colors of the rainbow, of the spectrum so to speak. It was a commercial add, most surprising and sensational. Alice kept staring at the painting entranced, with an expression of glee. And I, attracted to the beauty of her expression, the brilliancy of her eyes, was moved to kiss her, her full lips, a delicious tropical fruit, crimson colored and shinning, her opened mouth; we kissed shamelessly, long and deep.

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Beyond, in the innermost recesses of the apartment, as if in another dimension, in another area that was a place of her own, sat a most prodigious middle-aged woman, the possessor of a couple of intense, sparkling eyes, overwrought with emotion, which were devouring us with love. This was Alice’s ‘real mother’, the prostitute who had educated her. I have a very bright image of her, which is somehow mixed with the intensity of her feelings. She was very happy to see us. She grabbed Alice and placed her on her lap, caressed her, stroked her hair and kissed her on the mouth. Then she pulled me over to her and sat me on her lap, embraced me and gently kissed me on the mouth and said we were her children. Then she gave us tea while her companion continued working on his painting.

She sat with us and fondled us. Alice put her arms around her waist and called her mother and I realized that the woman somehow was her mother and that a lot of things had passed between them. All this while I had been on the point of passing out on account of the Sake and the strong weed Alice had brought from the coast. Nonetheless I completely surrendered to all this proffered love and count that couple as one of the more remarkable I ever met. Certainly there was a world of experience behind these people and I could sense the profound transformations they had operated upon their lives since they must have survived very intense hard times together and had come out into a wiser world of love and creativity in the later part of their lives.

Alice was very happy that I had met her adopted parents. That night we went back to the house, she undressed me, put me into bed, and laid with me caressing me all night. I went to sleep in her arms.

She did not stay very long that time, she left after a few days. She would send me a postcard from time to time, sometime from Oaxaca, sometime from Guatemala or Acapulco. One day she came with a young Spaniard she had met in Huautla. I remember she brought a water snake she had caught and domesticated in Huautla; it was a rather large animal and she set it free in the apartment and laughed a lot with her wonderfully rich and melodious laughter. She dared me grab hold of the serpent, I was a bit hesitant, nonetheless I grabbed hold of the animal after mastering the strange feeling that serpentine animals vibrate. The Spaniard looked like a man of character and personality if a bit young. Alice said that they were going to Switzerland where the Spaniard lived. I had the impression that the Spaniard belonged to the Basque separatist underground organization called E.T.A. I was not very happy with the idea and questioned Alice closely but she had her mind set on going to Europe. She looked at me with sad pleading eyes, reproaching me for not taking her to Europe where she had never been; but we had gone through this before, she knew I wanted to write, had to write; and she wanted to move, she could not stay by me. I understood this. It had been the unspoken agreement between us, that we were free, and we were now facing this agreement. It had to pass and it was very hard for both of us.

So she went with the Spaniard to Europe.

Some months later I received a letter from her in which she told me that she had met and married another Spaniard in Spain and that they owned a casino in the city of Segovia. She said ‘that she was very happy in Spain and that the Segovians called her, ‘La hija de Montezuma’.

About two years later she came to Mexico and visited me. This was in 1980. She showed me the photographs of her wedding and the picture of her young son. She stayed with me that night and 100

we made love for the last time as if we were parting. As we were making love she told me that she had been training in pistol firing at a secret base with E.T.A. in Spain. I was distraught and pleaded with her that she should not mix with violent politics. We did not say anymore.

Next day she was going to Queretaro to get her family together for a reunion before she returned to Spain. We went to a car rental agency in front of the Parque España. She wanted to rent a Volkswagen Combi to bring her family to Mexico City. We parted there in a sunny morning of August 1980 never to see each other again.

For many years I did not hear from her. One day in 1986 I went to see her aunt Josefina at her grandparents’ house. Her grandparents had died and her aunt could not tell me anything about Alice, all she knew is that she had disappeared mysteriously from her home in Segovia. There was a rumor that ‘she had gone on a ship and never been seen again’. This was distressing news. I did not tell her aunt what I knew about her connections with E.T.A. Then one September day in 1991 her aunt Josefina telephoned to say that Alice had died. When I asked her how or why all she could say was that she had died of pneumonia; but she did not know or did not want to tell me where. She said that Alice had died in April 1991. I had been thinking of her very strongly all that month of April 1991. I have had the curious feeling that she has been looking for me and that this time she won’t let me go until I finish this story, in fact I am certain she is sitting right beside me now.

San Angel, Sunday September 8th, 1991

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TITINA AND ANTOINETTE

Para Marisol y Ana Constanza

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The house stood on a hill overlooking the brown strong river. The stone pillars shone in the sunlight gray-green with tumescent humidity. Gray and green were the capitals, architraves, friezes, cornices. Above them towered the huge frontispiece dominating the ensemble, even the jungle beyond. The gray-green stone balustrade came down to the water over an ancient jetty now submerged. The brown river lapped the monoliths of the stairs.

The silent current swiftly passed spreading eastward towards the horizon. Now and then the head of a serpent would appear in the water like a raisin on a chocolate cake. No one knew why the house was there. Only Titina knew. In her dreams dwarves and elves had lived there; indeed, she saw them prancing in the balustrade under the silver light of the moon. Titina was eight years old, she lived in the village of Sensemaya.

Centuries ago, the governor had ordered the house closed and the people of Sensemaya did not go there and so the river continued to flow lapping the stone stairs of the balustrade and moss grew on the steps. About once a month Titina and her elder sister Antoinette would accompany their father to the nearby town of Mayumbe a few miles down the river. Then their father would paddle their canoe as far away from the house as he could steering in the farther side of the river. Titina would stick her head over the side of the canoe, try to raise herself and cry: ‘Father, go near the house, please’ she would plead. But her father would scold her and say: ‘sit down, Titina, sit down’.

The two girls could see the great stone house disappear in the distance after a bend in the river.

The day came when Titina and Antoinette had grown tall and brown like young tamarind trees. They were able to steal far into the jungle because they were not afraid. One day they decided to visit the house. They made tamarind water and sweet corn cakes. They poured the tamarind water into a Calabash gourd and put the corn cakes in a satchel. They each hung a machete on a leather sheaf around their slim, long necks and took the path that went through the corn fields into the jungle.

The morning mist hovered over the earth and on the river, shafts of sunlight illuminated the jungle and near the path they travelled wild orchids bloomed. A stork ran along the sandy banks of the river like a white robbed monk on his way to vespers. It suddenly took flight and the girls watched it lumbering, its wings gliding over the brown waters of the river, over the strong current, into the trees, far beyond, in the other bank of the river. Titina said it was an angel.

They soon came to the ruins of a stone house. The walls were still standing but the roof had long ago caved in. Shafts of light filtered through the mist past dangling fronds and into the doorways where large serpents slid among the fallen slabs of the roof. Twisted, rusted chains hung from the walls attached to curious bracelets that made the girls wonder. Over the broken walls they could see the hills and over the hills was the house.

Large terraces with balustrades overhung the stone ramparts over which the house stood at the center of a field of ferns surrounded by the trees, ceiba pentandra. The house had many doors and windows and the girls marveled at the smooth tall walls, the sober symmetry of every angle that made the lintels and window frames; innocently they knew that this was beauty itself in stone. Every door was closed with metal plates bolted to the frames; every window was barred with metal shutters.

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One especially large door was covered with metal panels sculptured in relief; there were figures of warriors with spears and helmets, tall ships in the open sea: griffins and lions. Two huge stone sculptures bore on their shoulders the arch that hung over the door way, these were strange creatures with goat legs and horned heads. Antoinette said they were demons.

They followed the path around the house until they stood under an enormous portico, under the tall columns of stone. The river opened up before them more than a thousand meters wide turning towards the far distance, ending in a straight line, longer and wider than anything they had seen.

The smooth stones of the portico were bare of ferns. They could not stick the tips of their machetes in between the lines of stones. They descended the balustrade towards the river and felt a warm sensation for at the distance they could see their own town of Sensemaya covered by a mantle of emerald green as far as their eyes could see.

To the left, in the opposite direction of Sensemaya, the Chagres River wound and uncoiled itself like a silver serpent until it was swallowed by the Great River. They had never seen so far or so clear; they were dizzy with the happiness of their accomplishment and sat down on the stone steps to eat some of the corn cakes and sip tamarind water and watch the river flow by ---The river that had seen their young lives grow, how they had changed into women and gone and washed their menstrual blood.

They went back to the house and stood in front of the largest door in the world; they thought. This was the door under the columned portico behind the row of pillars. Not even the doors of the church of Macunaima City was as beautiful as this, for in it, was the form of a young girl surrounded by horses with a single large pointed horn. They had never seen anything like this. They discussed the dress of the girl and argued about how many pieces it was made of. Titina said it was a wedding dress but Antoinette said it was nonsense: how could the girl ride the horses with such a dress and that besides there was no bridegroom standing besides her holding her hand. Titina said that the horses with the pointed horns were the bridegrooms. At this they both laughed loud and boldly remembering the horses making love to the mares of Sensemaya.

They decided to go into the house to see what wonders they could find: beautiful dresses, unicorns, what may! The doors gave way easily to the combined pull of their machetes. They opened gracefully and silently, being over three meters high. Outside, the river flowed silently in its tireless course; their lithe young bodies, their twin sisterly hearts throbbed with an excitement that made their ears burn. Not in their most languid and romantic dreams had they imagined the inside of the house to be like this. An animated group of people stared at them, the ladies in beautiful dresses, their men in handsome jackets, hey came with golden parasols, their servants bearing beautiful birds, holding jaguars in chains. All the company stared gaily at the girls from a balustrade painted on a large cupola in the roof. It took Titina and Antoinette a few minutes to realize that all those people were painted on the roof and the walls leading to the second story of the house.

Large circular stairs went up towards the people on the vault, grand rooms opened right and left. A multitude of objects rested undisturbed on tables and large chests. Pieces of furniture were covered with white cloth, chandeliers with hundreds of candles hung from the ceilings, mirrors reflected the rooms, and rooms that were painted on the walls of other rooms‌ people were seen coming out of doors painted on the walls. Succulent meals were being served to groups of seated guests by groups of standing servants and from the corners statues of warriors gazed at them with sardonic smiles.

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Up they climbed, the beautiful curbed stairs, passing through many rooms filled with lovely objects only half visible in the penumbra. The two sisters held their hands and danced with joy; they did not know why they felt so careless and free. Suddenly they stopped and turned deadly pale. Unaware they had entered a room and there a glimmer of light had revealed to them two skeletons laying side by side on a beautiful bed covered with a sky-blue silk canopy.

The skeletons were dressed in most beautiful velvets and embroidered silks. They were holding hands, a man and a woman. There were large round holes on the side of their skulls and the woman held a piece of paper between the fingers of her bonny hand.

Antoinette took it and read: Dear Moma and Papa, I have taken Cleitus with me this morning. I am going into the forest to meet Lautaro.

Love you always, Cristina, Your dear, Titina

Antoinette turned in horror to see Titina’s powerful dark eyes staring at her in deep joy.

December 1980, San Angel

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THE CIRCLE

For Jack and Gandalf, For tree planters

Para Carlos

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Many strange things there are in his world and I, Jack Doornart, Screefer Mac Duff, have seen my share of them. Yet I never thought that it would fall to me to behold the most secret, the most fantastic and awesome wonders that are surely hidden within the bowels of this Earth.

Early in July of 1978 I left the log cabin I called home in the Dryton Valley and gone to the Kananaskis on a tree planting contract. For two months I planted an average of nine hundred trees a day at a very good eighteen cents a tree. Yet such is the lot of tree planters that when a contract is over one must move and find another while the season lasts. With nearly six thousand dollars al hand and hoping to double my stake before the season was over, I went to Prince George to see a contractor friend of mine, and plant trees around The Crooked River area.

On my way there I stopped in Quesnel and was relieved of about five thousand dollars playing pool.

When I got to Prince George my friend had lost a deal with the Government of British Columbia to another contractor who offered to pay twelve cents per tree. My friend’s crew disbanded and I was left with a few hundred dollars and no contract. I stayed on Prince George for a few days hoping to strike a new deal. My money was running low and there was no contract. Towards the end of September I pointed my van in the direction of Victoria knowing I would be able to get on a fishing boat before the evil squalls of November started beating the sea.

I found a boat in the harbor named “The Gwynn”, owned and captained by a certain Robert, “Bobby”, Doyle. He took me on board and on September 28, 1978 we left the straights of Juan de Fuca, also known as Juan, “the Fucker”, by the local wags; for the fishing grounds off Queen Charlotte’s Islands.

The Gwynn was an old forty-five feet tub displacing a hundred and eighty tons, with two good cranes and enough room in its belly to swallow fish and fishermen whole. I was seaman ‘first class’ which meant that I got to operate the cranes, grease the greasy diesel engine, and stow away as much fish as came my way, and all this for one twenty-fifth of the bulk of the catch at fish market price Victoria harbor B.C. It was not a bad crew, seven of us, including Paddy Creran, the engineer. And five drifters, some college educated, others quite uneducated and one beyond all intimation of an education which seemed to me just and fitting he being the wisest and freest spirit on board outside of Bobby Doyle himself.

Bobby Doyle I had known for some years, a tall and powerful Irishman from County Cork, Ireland.

He was over fifty, no one knew his exact age so fifty it was. He was the happy possessor of a granite block of a head that managed a perennial smile deeply hewn into his face. It went with a pair of startlingly clear eyes, those that come from years at sea and from a deep reservoir of strength and confidence.

Paddy Creran was a gnome with a theatrically mournful face of sparkling little black eyes that bespoke of a malicious, often sardonic wit that made him one of the more steamed characters around Victoria harbor. His kelt blood bubbling incessantly, he was a monster with words, an inspired singer and natural poet who had to be prevented from tearing innocent people apart with his tongue. He said of Doyle: ‘Ah y’are an old cat that would bribe yer crew of mice vith cheese and drink all the grog yerself, pass the bottle…’ At which Doyle would burst out laughing and pass around a bottle of Brandy. Doyle and Creran had grown together in Cork and had come to Canada before 108

they turned twenty. Doyle was the bottle, Creran the cork. As for us, we were apprentices at sea, part timers, glad to be aboard; some fancied themselves to be writers others just liked to stare at the sea from where would spring our secret fantasies.

The Western Band of Vancouver Island is long, broaden still by its many bays and inlets, the mountains come down to the sea and the forests coexist with the waters, sometimes dark, sometimes luminous: dark forests that swallow the sea into immense bays that threaten the imagination of men with the unspeakable vitality of millions of trees. On a clear day the Coast Mountains emerge on the far horizon threatening to collapse on the sea like one last implacable white wave. Queen Charlotte Sound is a frigid sea of gray foam and expanding bellies of Sea Mountains wanting to engulf the decks of paper ships and timber boats. The put-put of the engine is a timid mouse, albeit courageous, slashing the waters of the sea, churning forward over the water and the sea ever crashing against the starboard and the larboard, the bow sending fine spray darting into men’s faces like needles of ice caught fire.

We entered the Hakai Passage, then navigating through Fitzhugh Sound reached the shores off Namu. There, in calm waters, we threw our nets hauling large quantities of tuna and salmon.

In frozen leather gloves, with frozen leather hands, drinking endless cups of coffee and brandy, we labored in silence. Only the electric winches would speak. From afar we seemed to be a collection of yellow lampreys animated on the huge backside of a mechanical wale, making electric noises, stealing the price of the sea with scientific knowledge.

On the second week of our stay off the coast of Namu, when we were on the point of leaving, something horrible happened. Where there had been calm, the unquiet sea began to stir angrily the side of the boat. There was no wind and yet the turbulence was terrible. The great forests south of Namu seemed impervious and indifferent to all this as if dissociating themselves from the sea.

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The mist floated from the land enveloping the deeper reaches of the sea. Out of the mist there now arose a terrible roar, original and unimaginably devastating to our innocent souls. We all knew that we were on the grip of certain implacable death. A tidal wave was coming to collect the dreamers and the dumb. We stood terrified waiting for the appearance of the unseen monster. Through the windows of the steering cabin Robert Doyle’s eyes seized to smile and became as large as the sea, as mysterious; with inquiry, they settled on an unseen destiny that had accompanied him all his life.

Paddy Creran was a most tragic actor, hands on the rail, mouth wide open in disbelief; someone had sprung a monstrous joke that not even he could top. And we, the dreamers, the drifters, gravitated like lost sea gulls towards the innermost recesses of our souls, wanting to scape, to leave behind our mortal bodies.

We were not to wait long, a white wave appeared renting the mind like an angry unwelcome image from a dream too real to be endured any longer. The boat was lifted towards the sky and tossed vertiginously into a maelstrom. It traveled through unfathomed regions of unspecified density disgorging the dead bodies of frozen fish and those of men paralyzed in terror, in the crystal clarity of underwater terror. Suddenly the boat emerged from a heinous sea and lunged forward like a great humpbacked whale foaming at the mouth and was projected on to the trees and crashed heavily on the side of a mountain.

I had entered a dream world where the senses were on strike and do not respond to the commands of the mind. Only images half perceived through the penumbra seemed to suggest the remnants of a lost world, like a battered millenary city ravaged by assault, bereft of voices; so was my body, bereft of human sound, of empty torpid figures vague and indistinct mixing with remote awareness glimpsed through the carats of a polished diamond of a thousand windows filled with aqueous light through which the half remembered faces of friends seemed to glide.

I lived in this world for a long time, so long a time in fact that I do not now know if it has passed. For I drifted through several worlds that seemed more terrible as this incongruous time passed; as if I had died and had come back again. What I saw during these travels through the half lit passages of

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amber light is unspeakable, because there are no images stored in our universe that may correspond to such heinous realities that at times I thought I saw and that later became an intolerable presence.

At length a pattern of images established itself, they being associated for the first time with feeling.

I was in a white ice cave, covered in a white skin surrounded by white forms with peering blue eyes.

I was being fed what seemed to me strips of dried meat and warm milk. Slowly, the white forms about me, acquired a distinct reality and I beheld what no man has seen before or since. These were PEOPLE of great strength and height, completely covered WITH THICK, WOOLY WHITE HAIR, who wore no clothes and had blue eyes and who spoke in whispers. What they spoke I could not at first understand. It was a monotonous sound with no variations in pitch. It seemed to be continuous, devoid of inflexion or emphasis; nay, even emotion, yet it seemed to contain meaning of an intelligent sort.

At times one of these creatures would crouch by me and stare at me for long intervals. During these periods I became aware of vague stirrings in my memory as if I were being prodded to remember a long lost connection, gently prodded by an outside force. My feeding continued and little by little I began to regain my strength. It was one very large creature who brought me food and crouched by me. The creature who tended me had blue eyes of immense intelligence. It did not speak to me but seemed to be mending and binding some lost elements of my unconscious, for I could feel faint stirrings in my memory.

The air was very thin and cold inside this white world and yet I did not feel uncomfortable and after a while I could breathe easily. I realized that I was wrapped in thick white skins and was sustained by reasonable amounts of dried meat and milk. The milk was strongly flavored and it was warm. The eyes that watched over me were as I have said blue, deep blue, like the color of a clear Himalayan sky and fathomlessly profound, just like the sky. This being had very large pink ears very much like our own except that they had a wider corpus like a parabolic antenna. They were well provided with venous ramifications and you could see the blood in them flow because the ears were nearly transparent and seemed very fragile. The hands of this creature, and they were hands very much like our own, were as thick as leather gloves, and the over side was covered with thick white hair like the rest of its body. This creature seemed to have a penis and testicles covered by thick white hair. Its feet and legs were like heavy lambskin boots. It moved very gracefully and in very long strides. It most have been nearly eight feet tall and weighed well over five hundred pounds. But what were most remarkable were its eyes.

Very soon I was quite tranquil and not afraid of this creature. Its eyes were immensely clear and intelligent in a calm unstinting un-emotionality that did not flicker or fluctuate; they were always steady and curiously innocent. But I must say that there was no curiosity in them, perhaps because it was reading my mind. We were evidently in an ice cave, light and air coming in from every direction. I could not tell how big this cave was; nor in what part of it were we. I had no idea how long I had been there... Neither could I tell the time, my only reference being periods of light and darkness. Yet I could not speak of darkness in the sense of total obscurity, on the contrary, there was only a faint change of light; and then it became silvery and brilliant, like the silver light of the moon across a very clear atmosphere. I could see very well during ´the night’ and my guardian, I fancied, could see even better. This was obvious from its movements which were as graceful and assured as during daylight.

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One day, the creature stared intently at me, as it always did, telling me to sit, which I did, much amazed at the ease with which I accomplished this feat. He stood up and I stood up. He took my hand and we walked dawn the cave. Outside my eyes beheld the most wondrous sight I ever laid eyes: range upon range of White Mountains extended over every direction. The air was cool and icy, penetrating into my brain, flowing inside, clearing the mind as in preparation.

Near the cave there was a faint slope that opened up into a vast white plain descending to some peaks nearby. The majesty of the sky was dominant. It was a luminous blue like the eyes of my friend beside me, who now very clearly read my thoughts and seemed to be sharing my emotions. I now saw the beauty of this white being clad by the full light of day and marveled at this unexpected encounter. Bands of energy uncoiled and recoiled inside my body as we exchanged messages at the speed of light.

He told me his name was Yagoth, that he was a man like me, and that his race were descendants from a branch of Man that had retreated with the ice many thousands of years ago. He said that his race lived in the inaccessible reaches of Eternal Snow; that they could tele-transport themselves by bringing their desired place of destiny to themselves, and was suddenly gone into a far corner of the plain were I could see him very clearly and was back again in an instant. He did not have to say that they were acquainted with telepathy.

I looked out into the vastness of the mountain ranges and then up towards the sky. I felt an inexpressible elation and wellbeing as if some sordid crime had been lifted from my mind. A tear streaked dawn my face. Yagoth stood beside me looking at the infinite reaches of the sky. Suddenly he motioned with his hand towards the outer reaches of the plain, two white figures barely distinguishable over the snow were advancing very fast towards us as if gliding through the air; they seemed hardly to touch the snow but rather they moved through it interspersed over chosen particles as if the snow responded to their motile wishes. It was as near a conquest of gravity, the most awesome agility that I had ever encountered. One day I would see them glide over vertical walls of rock understanding their choice of displacement with perfect clarity.

Yagoth stood immobile until he two figures reached us. He had summoned them. Presently they were here standing before us. They communicated directly, one was Yareth and the other Ita. They were female. Their mere presence had a different somatic effect upon my libido. An inner sensation of beauty filled my body and mind, much the same as I recall experiencing when I first saw Andrea Mantegna’s oil of The Virgin and Child under a huge red coral at The MusÊe du Louvre in Paris. It was very much akin to spiritual ecstasies, except that these women were touching my somatic centers in a way that only women can. They were beautiful snow women, more graceful than Yagoth, yes, in a different manner; they were feminine. They communicated this, also their bodies were different, with beautiful, pear shaped breasts.

Yagoth, Yareth, Ita and I re-entered the cave and walked dawn a long passage curiously illuminated.

We had long left the mouth of the cave and had entered the bowels of the mountain. The space was quite illuminated but I could see no apparent reason for this. We arrived at a large rotunda overhung by an icy cupola filled with people of the snow.

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Moss and hot springs grew into pools of steamy water. The people of the snow were tending a species of white haired wooly yaks. As if answering my question Yagoth said that they did not eat much for they charged their metabolism directly from the blue in the sky and through various other means he did not then explain; something akin to orgone energy and Prana. He said that the Ur, for that was their collective name, lived up to a thousand years and reproduced themselves once or twice in their lifetimes. Their family ties are strong and their relationships last for hundreds of years.

My questions now emerged very fast into my consciousness and were instantaneously answered by either Yagoth, Yareth or Ita. I learned that The Ur can see up to fifty times farther than humans and with a much clearer resolution. They can also hear a wider spectra of sound, more acute or fainter than we can. They can detect an animal, human or mechanical noise before they can actually see its source, partly because light and sound travel faster in the thin atmosphere they inhabit. At this they informed me that they had lowered my bioelectric frequency to adapt me to the high altitude we were.

Some of the Ur could tele-transport fairly large distances. They informed me that their greatest centers were indeed in Tibet. And that yes, their centers were so inaccessible, and in any case, so uninhabitable by other humans that they could never be found. Yagoth told me that it had been himself who had seen the wreck of “The Gwynn” from Monarch Mountain. He continued to describe how it happened. How I had been the only survivor, and how he had brought me himself across the Coast Mountains, over The Selwyn to the Mackenzie Range. He assured me that he would take me to Macmillan Pass from where I could return to Prince George.

We had entered an inner circle much larger than the first. I was surprised to see a pool of tranquil waters as cool and reflective as quicksilver. I was given a large chunk of rock, a very large uncut diamond. Instantly the faces of Bobby Doyle, Paddy Creran and the rest of my mates appeared reflected on the surface of the pool just as I had seen them tranquilly going about our work on a calm day. Yagoth gently retrieved the diamond and it was best for I did not want to look into that pool again. We entered a gallery conducting to a small circular chamber were sat each, in an individual niche, two dozen men and women of The Snow with their eyes closed. They seemed more powerful than even my companions had appeared to me with all their astonishing manifestations of strength.

One Snow Man opened his eyes and fastened them on me: “I am Astoreth, we are The Circle, we generate the light, we can see even into the cities of The Earth and with our Snow Brothers and Sisters we help stabilize the Biosphere. Many thousands of years ago we retreated with the ice and we have been with the ice even to this day. We feed directly from the blue in the sky and we meditate; we watch out for The Earth. Throughout the ages we have visited our brothers in the lowlands in their dreams and suggested to them certain knowledge that we ourselves have acquired and stored in our brains from time immemorial. We have no books, only our eyes and our brains wherein dwells Ur. We of The Circle, and when we sit in a circle are Ur. “During the time of the snow we cross the Earth to form other Circles with our brothers and sisters of Tibet. We cross the North Pole and Siberia and enter Tibet through the Altai Mountains. We live many centuries, we can enter states of hibernation or we can generate powerful bands of bioenergy within The Circle- There have always been Circles on Earth… There are other circles on Earth; circles of power, destructive of light and spiritual strength, but we of The Circle are stronger than 113

they… and they shall not prevail. This is why we have never shown ourselves to you, nor will we break the ring… Go in peace, Jack Doornart, for no one will ever believe what you have seen. Yagoth shall give you some Bank of America Travelers Checks and you shall be placed near the Aramco Station at Macmillan Pass”. Astoreth closed his eyes and resumed his place in The Circle.

Afterwards, Yagoth, Yareth, Ita and I stood at the entrance of the great cave and let the Polar wind brush our faces and the sun warm our bodies, accepting the power of the Earth as it extends and flows from every corner of this mighty Planet. Powerful bands of Love shook our bodies as I, Jack Doornart, human and my three Ice Companions stood viewing with the same awe the majesty of this World on this journey that is ours.

San Angel, June 8, 1983

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