The Journeyer

Caro Gesu, what had gone wrong? Could it be that the engineers had misunderstood? My arms were weary of the waving, and I was sweating profusely, though the sun was still behind the mountains and the morning was not yet warm. Could it be that the engineers had waited to see my signal before even placing the balls? Why had I entrusted this enterprise—and now my very life—to a dozen thickheaded Mongol rankers? Would I have to stand here, waving more and more feebly, for another eternity or two, while the engineers leisurely did what should have been done already? And how long after that would it be before they even began lackadaisically to rummage around in their belt purses for flint and steel? And during all that time, must I stand here flailing this extremely eye-inviting yellow flag? Bayan might be convinced that no warrior ever looked back voluntarily, but any of those Yi had only to stumble and fall, or be knocked sprawling, so that his head turned this way. He could hardly fail to see such an uncommon battlefield sight as I presented. He would yell to his companion warriors, and they would come pelting toward me, loosing arrows as they came … .

The green landscape was blurred by sweat running into my eyes, but I saw a brief flicker of yellow at the corner of my vision. Maledetto! I was letting the banner sag; I must hold it higher. But then, where the flick of yellow had been, there was now a puff of blue against the green. I heard a chorus of “Hui!” from my fellows still prone in the grass, and then they leapt up to stand beside me, cheering “Hui!” again and again. I let the flag and its lance drop, and I stood panting and sweating and watching the yellow flashes and blue smokes of the huo-yao balls doing what they had been intended to do.

The whole center of the valley, where now the Yi and the Bho mock-Mongols were intimately commingled, was clouded by the dust raised by their fierce confusion. But the flashes and smokes were high above that dome of dust, and not obscured by it. They were up where I would have put them myself, twinkling and puffing from those crevices in the castle-like rock outcrops. They did not all ignite at once, but flared by ones and twos, from one mountain height and then another. I was pleased that the engineers had placed them where I would have done, and I was pleased when I counted twelve ignitions; every single ball had performed as warranted—but I was dismayed by the apparent puniness of them. Such tiny flashes of fire, and so soon extinguished—and leaving only such insignificant plumes of blue smoke. The sound of them came much later and, though the noises were loud enough to be heard above the clamor of shouting and scuffling down in the valley, they were no such thunderous roar as I had heard when my palace chamber was demolished. These noises of ignition were only sharp slaps of sound—as might have been produced by a Yi warrior yonder hitting the flat of his sword on a horse’s flank—one and two slapping sounds, and then several together in a sustained crackle of slaps, and then the final few separate again.

And then nothing more happened, except that the furious but futile battle continued unabated down in the valley, where none of the combatants seemed to have noticed our byplay in the heights. The Orlok turned and gave me a lacerating look. I shrugged my eyebrows helplessly at him. But suddenly all the other men were murmuring “Hui!” in a wondering way, and they were all pointing, and most of them in different directions. Bayan and I looked first where one was pointing, and then where another was, and another. Over here, high up, the cleft gashed in a wall-like rock was perceptibly widening. Over there, high up, two great slabs of rock that had been side by side were gradually leaning apart. Over yonder, high up, a pinnacle of rock like a castle keep was toppling over, and breaking into separate rocks as it did so, and spraying those rocks apart, and doing all those things as slowly as if it had been under water.

If those mountains truly never had suffered an avalanche before, then because they never had, they may have been ready and poised for one. I think we could have accomplished our intentions with just three or four of the brass balls lodged on either side of the valley; we had put six on each side, and all had done their work. And, puny as was the commencement of the performance, the conclusion was spectacular. I can best describe it thus: consider the high rocks to have been a few exposed knobs of the backbones of the mountains, and consider our charges to have been hammer blows that broke the bones. As the mountains’ spines crumbled, their earth cover began to peel away here and there, like a hide being skinned piecemeal off an animal. And as the hide wrinkled and folded, the forests began to shed and shred off it, as a camel’s fur does in summertime, in unsightly tufts and patches.

As early as the breaking-away of the first rocks, we watchers could feel the hill under us tremble, though we were many li distant from the very nearest of those rockslides. The valley floor had to be quivering then, too, but the two armies conjoined in battle still took no notice; or, if they did, every man and woman no doubt believed it to be only his or her own personal quaking of fear and rage. I remember thinking: that must be the way we mortals will ignore the first tremors of Armageddon, continuing to pursue our trivial and pitiful and spiteful little strifes even while God is loosing the unimaginable devastation that will end the world and all.

But a goodly piece of the world was being devastated right here. The falling rocks dislodged other rocks below them and, rolling and sliding, they gouged up great swathes and whole zonte of earth and then, rocks and earth together, they scoured their various mountainsides of their vegetation, the trees toppling and colliding and heaping up and overlying and splintering, and then the surface of each mountain and everything that grew upon it or was contained within it—boulders, rocks, stones, clods, loose earth, meadow-sized pieces of rumpled turf, trees, bushes, flowers, probably even the forest creatures caught unawares—all came down, down into the valley, in a dozen or more separate avalanches, and the noise of them, until now delayed by distance, finally began to batter our ears. It was a mutter that grew to a growl that grew to a roar that grew to a thunder, but a thunder like I never heard before—not even in the unstable heights of the Pai-Mir, where the noises had often been loud, but never for longer than a few minutes. This thunder here continued to grow in volume and to create echoes and to collect and absorb the echoes, and to bellow ever louder, as if it never would reach its loudest. Now the hill on which we stood was quivering like a jelly—the noise alone might have been enough to shake it—so that we could scarcely keep our feet, and all the trees nearby us were rustling so they shed many of their leaves, and birds were bursting up everywhere, squawking and screeching, and the very air around us seemed to quake.

The rumblings of the several avalanches would have overwhelmed the noise of battle in the valley, but there was no more of that shouting and war-crying and clinking together of sword blades. The poor people had at last perceived what was happening, and so had the camp’s herds of horses, and the people and horses were scurrying hither and thither. Being myself in a state of some agitation, I could not too well discern what the people were doing individually. I saw them rather as an indistinct mass—like the blurred masses of landscape coming down the mountains roundabout—the thousands of people and horses all running in a tremendous, untidy bunch. The way they were moving, I might have thought the whole valley floor was tilting back and forth and sloshing them from side to side of it. Except for the numbers already struck down in combat, lying motionless or moving only feebly, the people and horses seemed first, and all at the same time, to glimpse the havoc hurtling toward them down the western slopes, and they all ran in a body away from there, only to see the other calamity coming down the eastern slopes, and all in a body they surged back again to the middle of the valley floor, all but a few who jumped into the river, as if they were fleeing a forest fire and might find safety in the cool water. Some two or three dozen individuals—I did make out that much—were running straight down the valley’s middle, toward us, and probably others were scampering up it in the other direction. But the avalanches were moving faster than any mere human could.

And down they came. Though the swooping blurs of brown and green contained whole forests of full-sized trees and countless boulders as big as houses, they looked, from where we stood, like cascades of dirty, gritty, lumpy tsampa porridge being poured down the sides of a giant tureen to puddle in its bottom, and the towering clouds of dust they raised on the way looked like the steam rising from that tsampa porridge. When the several separate slides reached the lower skirts of their mountains, they coalesced on either side into a single stupendous avalanche roaring into the valley—one from the east, one from the west —to meet in the middle. Rasping across the flat valley floor, they must have slowed their rush to some slight degree, but not so I could see it, and the front face of each cataract was still as high as a three-story wall when they came together. And when they did that, it made me remember once having seen two great mountain rams, in the season of rut, gallop at each other and butt their huge horned heads together with a shock that made my own teeth shake.

I would have expected to hear a similarly teeth-rattling crash when the two monster avalanches met head on, but their thunder climaxed instead with a sort of cosmically loud kissing noise. The Jin-sha River, on its way through this valley, ran along its eastern edge. So the landslide sluicing down from the east simply scooped up a considerable length of that river as it careered across it, and, as it continued on, must have churned that water into its forward content so that its front became a wall of sticky muck. When the two careening masses came together,