stucco.”
“It’s dry.”
“It’s the desert.”
“I mean, there’s no water in it.”
“This is just one of them. There are dozens all around these hills.”
“Are you going to show me all of them?”
He stared at me for a moment. In the sunlight his eyes appeared to have no color at all.
“Would you like to see my favorite spot in Aden?” he asked.
“Is it in the shade?”
“It isn’t far, about two hundred meters, and there might be some shade.”
“Shouldn’t we be getting back to the hotel? The doctor will be worried about us.”
“Why?”
“Because he expects to find us there.”
“Are you afraid of him?”
“No.”
“Does he beat you?”
“No. Never.”
“I see. He just cuts off your fingers.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You said something like that.”
“I think I’ll go back to the hotel,” I said, turning carefully around; I didn’t want to tumble into the pit.
“Wait. I promise it isn’t far, and we can rest there before hiking back down.”
“What is it?”
“A holy place.”
I narrowed my eyes at him suspiciously, and when I did, sweat dripped into my eyes and the world melted a little.
“A church?”
“Did I say that? No. I said ‘a holy place.’ Come, it is not far. I promise.”
We climbed another series of steps that ran along a low stone wall. I looked to my left and saw Crater spread out below us, the white-washed buildings undulating in the blistering heat. At the end of the wall, Rimbaud turned right, and we continued to climb up a wide dirt path that rose steeply toward the cloudless sky. The crunch of our shoes in the volcanic dust, the heaving of air in and out of our lungs—that was the only sound as we labored to the top, where the end of the path met the pale, bled-out blue of the sky. Cresting the hill, we found ourselves at the base of a small plateau five hundred feet above the extinct crater. Another series of steps led up to the top.
“How much farther?” I asked Rimbaud.
“We are almost there.”
We rested for a moment after this final ascent, in the slice of shade beneath an archway cut into a six-foot-high stone wall that curved out of sight in either direction, a barrier that encircled the holy place of sun and rock and silent sentinel stone, high above the sea.
We sat with our backs against the cool stone, and Rimbaud wrapped his lean arms around his upraised knees and stared dreamily down into the town nestled in the blasted guts of the dead volcano.
“So what do you think?” he asked. “The best view in Aden.”
“Is that why you brought me up here, to show me the view?” I returned. I was weak from the climb, overheated and terribly thirsty. Why had I agreed to come with him? I should have stayed at the hotel.
“No, but I thought you’d like it,” he said. “You are at the entrance to the Tour du Silence, the Tower of Silence, called Dakhma by the Parsi. It is a holy place, as I told you, forbidden to outsiders.”
“Then, why did you bring me here?”
“To show it to you,” he said slowly, as if sp220;To shong to a simpleton.
“But we are outsiders.”
He stood up. “I am outside nothing.”
There were no sentries posted, no guards to man the entrance or patrol the grounds of the Dakhma. Dakhma did not belong to the living; we were the interlopers here. Our approach to the tower was noted only by the crows and kite hawks and several large white birds that glided effortlessly in the updrafts of superheated air.
“Are those eagles?” I asked.
“They are the white buzzards of Yemen,” answered Rimbaud.
The Dakhma occupied the far end of the compound, at the highest spot on the plateau. It was a simple structure—three massive seven-foot-thick concentric stone circles, with a pit dug inside the smallest, innermost
