Back to The Book of Ninety and Nine Doomed Cities
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Apparitions are not uncommon in the desert of Kom Shufaqa, lying as it does a few days journey from the Mounts of Har. There the seasons are distinguished solely by their winds - the Ranak, which brings salt dust and madness; the Qohan from the Dead Lakes, carrying strange dreams and black-green locusts the length of a man's hand; and the Nhir, the western wind which heralds the rain in fortunate years. The season that is most ill to travel in is that time between the shrill whistle of the Qohan and the furious onset of the Nhir, when no wind blows at all.
That is the time when the apparitions come; when there is nothing in Kom Shufaqa to intercede between its inhabitants and the master of their land, the sun, who needs no slaves and spurns the obeisance of earthbound Gods. {Then the apparitions come, when no wind carries away the vapours that seep from the base of certain standing stones.}
I am not speaking of the mirages, familiar enough to the men of Kom Shufaqa - the lakes which appear and then disappear, on which some have glimpsed fleets of swift feluccas with golden sails. The Bemmel know these to be the vain offerings of Abamael and Manat to placate the sun, who does not suffer them long to exist.
No, the apparitions I speak of come in the night, when Kom Shufaqa is a kiln with ten thousand stars, and men begin to despair of sleep and hope for oblivion. Then, when all mortal things are made impossible - when the waking world seems a dream, and all the works of thinking beings incomprehensible and impermanent as a mist that passes across the face of a moon - it is then the apparitions of which I speak can be seen.
One day a traveller of the race of the Ruhurdh was crossing the Kom Shufaqa. To the people of that race, who style themselves the Varsnak, the sun is no worse than a stern mother. They take little water and less food, and trust in the amulets they wear to preserve them from mortal and immortal dangers. Above one of the dry rivers that runs through the Kom Shufaqa from Har to the Dead Lakes, the traveller came to a hill of crumbling grey stone. She ascended to the top of it, being of a mind to look for a certain landmark on the horizon to make sure of her path. For there are a thousand such hills in the Kom Shufaqa, too numerous to be named, and each the same as the others. At the top of the hill, she found instead only a slab of diorite, worked by unknown hands. There were figures that looked like birds graven on it, and others of beasts, and many kinds of men, and in places the slab was worn entirely smooth by many seasons. Since the day was ending, and the landmark she sought was not to be seen on the horizon, she halted in that place so as to observe the stars.
After the sun had passed, and the traveller had said the prayer that is said to speed it on its way, she watched until the place of the rising of Ubar was evident; and she noted the declension of the constellation of the Headless Man, and the blue star that is the eye of Flaigar, and fixed in this way her course for the morrow.
And she says that in that night an apparition came to her, of a race she had never seen before; and its face was veiled in a pale mist. She says the apparition told her how once the slab she had seen had stood upright, in the midst of a great square, and its figures were gilded and painted with crimson and black, while the square was paved with jasper and carnelian, and on every side of it stood fine buildings of which no trace remained. And the apparition told her of the colonnades of copper pillars that lined four sides of the place of the fountains, which stood a little way below the great square in the direction where the star Ubar rises in the season of stillness. And the apparition told her also of the plain along the river green with gardens, and speckled with the white of marble palaces, and the sweet fires burning incense before the nine and thirty temples of Om Thaleer.
The traveller says that the apparition told her of the name of that city, and of the seven heroes who established and held it in the days of its glory, and of the lamentable one who by his pride brought it to destruction; they were not Ruhurdhish names, she says, but strange ungodly names of remote times, difficult to remember, so she has forgotten them all.
And now she avoids whenever she can spending her nights atop the hills of grey stone in the Kom Shufaqa, each the same as the others, for she has no great desire to speak with apparitions.
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