Lin Carter - Zanthodon 1 - Journey To The Underground World

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Journey to the Underground World

by Lin Cater>

Chapter 1. EAST OF SUEZ

It was the glint of steel in the folds of the red burnoose that caught my eye-the bright flash of sunlight on

a naked dagger!

It was just half an hour before noon, in the native quarter of Port Said. I can be precise about the time

because I recall that even as I glimpsed the glitter of bare steel, the ululating cry of the selam was

echoing from where the mueddin stood on the gallery of the little mosque behind me. And it was a

Friday, for that wailing cry, that humble salute to Allah, is chanted forth upon that day and in that hour

all across the East, and thus it has been for generations beyond the numbering . . . .

The midday sun was roasting and the air was dry as dust and reeked of amazing stenches: goat urine and

unwashed men and cooking sausages and raw onions and heady musk and sweet sandalwood and the

fresh dung of camels. A medley of odors that, to me, will always say-Egypt.

In the square before me surged a gaudy throng. Brown children shrieked and chased each other;

mongrels growled over scraps of garbage, a lemonade merchant jangled his tin cups not unmusically;

women robed and veiled in black, with only their kohl-rimmed eyes visible, shrilled as they fought down

the price of bright cloth with a fat, fez-hatted shopkeeper; French girls in light frocks from the cruise

ship moored in the harbor poked through a wooden tray of silver bracelets and turquoise brooches;

oblivious to the noise, the stenches, the milling crowd, an elderly gentleman sat crosslegged under a

striped awning, sipping tea with the serene dignity of a graven Ramses; two swarthy Armenians haggled

over an opal large as a human eye.

I had caught that bright flash of naked steel from the corner of my eye. Turning in the same instant, I

peered into the mouth of a narrow alleyway behind the mosque. It was black as the Styx and choked

with putrid garbage. But not so black that I could not see the three men who struggled there and even the

reek of rotting garbage could not drown the cold and bitter smell of villainy and red murder.

I sprang upon the taller of the red-robed men and knocked him face down on the slimy cobbles-turned to

seize the bony dark wrist of the second man with my left hand, twisting it until the hooked dagger

dropped to clang upon the paving stones while I drove the balled fist of my right into his lean belly.

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He paled to the hue of sour milk, sank to his knees, eyes rolling up to display bloodshot whites, then

folded forward and began noisily to lose his breakfast. Stepping to one side I put my booted foot on the

dirty wrist of the first assassin, who was worming stealthily toward the fallen knife; his wrist bones

crunched under my weight and he squealed like a gutted lamb. Then I reached for the third man they had

been about to mug, caught him by an upper arm and rapidly propelled him out of the fetid darkness and

into the clamor and bustle of the marketplace.

He blinked at the dazzling impact of the noontime sun and tottered woozily, panting to recover his

breath. I looked him over. He was an odd, comical little man, very thin and quite a bit shorter than I, and

somewhere in his sixties as far as I could judge. He was dressed in stained, disreputable khaki shorts and

a safari shirt, both several sizes too big for his scrawny frame. A huge, old-fashioned sun helmet covered

most of his bony, baldish head. His pointed nose supported a pair of antiquated nose-glasses-pince-nez, I

think they are called-these teetered insecurely and were often askew.

His eyes were large and watery and blue, under tufted, snowy brows, and looked curiously out of place

in his leathery tanned face, which was bony and long-jawed. A stiff little tuft of white goatee jutted from

the point of his chin, and a white mustache bristled from his upper lip, creating the illusion of a

Vandyke. When he spoke, his voice was highpitched, querulous, with an Oxford accent; and he spoke in

a rather verbose, slightly pompous, very pedantic manner.

"Holy Heisenberg!"he wheezed. "You arrived in the very nick of time, young man!"

"Are you okay?"I inquired. "Did they get your wallet?"

"Eh? Wallet . . . ?"

I nudged his bony hip, felt a reassuring flattish bulge. How the two thieves had lured the old fellow into

that dark alley I did not bother to inquire: he looked so absent-minded and unworldly and easily

bamboozled, there was no reason to inquire. So I took his arm again, propelled him a quarter way around

the square and into the cool dimness of the Cafe Umbala. The Nubian waiter, who knew me well,

grinned, white teeth flashing in his ebony face, amused, doubtless, at the odd couple we made. The little

man in soiled khaki kit came only to my armpit; he was thinner than the legendary rail, and my weight

could have made three of him, or nearly. He waggled a stiff white goatee in my direction and attempted

a jerky little bow, which made his old-fashioned sun helmet fall over his bald brow, knocking his glasses

askew.

"Your unexpected assistance, sir, was timely and most welcome,"he said breathlessly. "Those two

ruffians-!"

I drew him to a seat behind a tiny table set against a wall of flaking plaster adorned with posters

advertising such varied amusements as a Parisian chanteuse, who really hailed from Constantinople, a

Chinese magician who was actually an exBrooklyn cardsharp of pure Gypsy descent, and a brand of

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liquor fermented from overripe prunes and fit, from my experience, only for removing old paint from

cheap furniture.

"Relax-catch your breath, pop,"I counseled. At my elbow the Nubian waiter materialized like a genie

from the Arabian Nights: "Dry mahtini, sah?"

"Yep, Tabiz, the usual,"I said. "What's your poison, old timer?"

The white tuft of goat-beard jutted skyward stiffly and I received a frosty glare. "Potter is the name, my

good man-Professor Potter."

"Okay, Doc, have it your way,"I grinned. "But what'll you have?"

He sniffed sharply. "As a rule, I do not indulge . . . still and all, I suppose . . . under the

circumstances . . . just to restore the tissues . . . for medicinal purposes only, you understand! . . . under

the advice of my physician . . . a drop or two of spiritous beverage can do no harm, surely?"

"Surely,"I nodded.

"Straight gin,"he snapped at the waiter. "Gordon's, if you stock it; Boodle's will do."

It turned out to be Old Mr. Boston, but gin (I have found) is gin.

We talked over our drinks. For the past two months I had been out "east of Suez"as Sax Rohmer or

Talbot Mundy would put it, in the desert country in Sinai, performing some rather delicate shipping

flights in an old Sikorsky chopper supplied me by a Greek importer.

Let's not mince words: I'd been smuggling out antiquities for a fellow named Pappadappoulas who

daren't risk trying to get the stuff out through customs. Nothing much, just broken pottery and a couple

of chewed-up Syro-Roman busts; anyway, the Greek either defaulted or got busted and I found myself

with about seventy dollars American in my jeans and the proud owner of a beatup Sikorsky, which was

probably also hot. As I carelessly filled the Professor in on my recent business venture, he interrupted

me with excitement written all over his whiskery visage:

"A helicopter, you say, my boy? Great Galileo!- how utterly fortuitous! Does it . . . ah . . . is the vehicle

in sky worthy condition?"he inquired breathlessly, a feverish glint in his watery optics,

I shrugged. "A drop of oil here and there and the other place, and a full tank of the best octane, that's all

it needs. We needed the chopper, you understand, 'cause we had to fly low. Mr. Sadat's customs men use

radar now, and the border country fringes some on Israeli-held territory. Antiaircraft batteries, you

know . . . and trigger fingers get mighty itchy in that part of the world . . . "

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Something like prophetic bliss shone in his misty eyes. An adam's apple the size of a golfball wobbled

up and down in his stringy throat, measuring the intensity of his emotion just as the mercury does in a

thermometer.

"When you saved me from those scalawags, my boy,"he said huskily, "I thought . . ."And he rattled off a

line or two of Swahili. Well, it was pure Swahili as far as I was concerned; it turned out to be Greek.

Then he cleared his throat apologetically: "Hem! Forgive me, lad . . . Simonides the Athenian . . . One

welcomes the arrival of a friend in need, even if he be a stranger at the time."

"You don't have to-"

He silenced me with a magnificent gesture. "Not at all! The poet echoed my feelings of the moment; but

now that I learn you possess a helicopter, I feel, rather (with Ephialtes), 'Be serene: the Gods will

provide you with the thing you need, in the hour appointed-'"

He leaned forward suddenly, as if to transfix me with that white spike of stiff beard.

"Have you ever heard of Zanthodon?" he whispered hoarsely.

Of course, I hadn't; nor has hardly anyone, this side of the half a dozen or so scholars in the world who

read "proto-Akkadian."The Doc, as I soon found out, was never so happy as when he was explaining

something to somebody. So he began explaining.

"Proto-Akkadian . . . name of the Underground World. . . the "Great Below"of the Sumerians, Na-an-

Gub . . . the Babylonians, who came along much later, you know, called it 'Irkalla.' . . ."

"No, I don't think I-"

"Also seems to have been known to the ancient Egyptians and to the Hebrew prophets,"he continued,

blandly riding over my interjection. "The Hebrews called it Tehom, the 'Great Deep' . . . there resided

the nephilim, the earth-giants of Hebrew myths . . . it appears that the Egyptians may have called the

Underground World Amentet. It was the Sacred Land, the Underworld of the Dead-the Land in the

West,"he said, with peculiar emphasis, eyes agleam.

"Listen, Professor, I-"

"Now this is particularly interesting, my boy,"he rode on, paying me no mind. "For the Sumerians

located their own version of Zanthodon-Na-an-Gub-in 'the land Martu,' which is to say, in the west."

Tabiz brought us a second round. The Doc knocked his straight back as if it were apple juice instead of

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pure gin. He licked his lips and continued:

"Even the Moslems know the legend . . . to them it is Shadukiam, the underworld of the djinns, ruled by

Al-Dimiryat . . . Also in the west: "toward the setting sun". . . all of these peoples seem to have thought

of Zanthodon as a genuine place; more than one traveler, I hazard, actually tried to find it . . . none were

successful, apparently. As the Pyramid Texts put it, in one of their more memorable verses:"and his

voice sank to a spooky whisper as he recited,

"None cometh from thence that he may tell us how they fare, That he may tell us what they need, that he

may set our hearts at rest, Until we also go to the place whither they art gone, The place from which

there is no returning . . . ."

I have to confess a tingle crawled its way up my spine: there was a ring to the old boy's voice that the

late Boris Karloff might have envied.

I cleared my throat.

"Underworlds are pretty common in mythology, aren't they?"I said. "Hell and Hades and Sheol . . ."

He nodded vigorously. "And Duat and Dilmun, et cetera . . . yes, quite right! But as I was saying, my

boy-"

He went on; I gave up, leaned back, and savored my cocktail. There was no stopping Professor Potter

once he got started talking.

"My first clue as to the whereabouts of the entrance to Zanthodon I discovered in the old Babylonian

creation epic, Enuma Elish . . . something to the effect that in the month of Adar, the Door to Irkalla lay

'under the Path of Shimmah' . . . Now Shimmah (which the Egyptians called Khonuy) equates to the sign

Pisces; and the month of Adar in the Babylonian calendar is about the same as the Egyptian month

Mesore. Which means February!"

"Um,"I said around a mouthful of martini.

"Then I discovered in Smyrna, in a Greek manuscript of Zosimus the Panopolitan, reference to a

fragment of the old Egyptian geographer, Claudius Ptolemy (the fragment is considered dubious by

some authorities, but there you are! No one quite agrees on these things)-and Zosimus, quoting Ptolemy,

placed the Mouth of Hades (Ptolemy meant Amentet) beneath the path of Pisces in the month

Anthesterion."

He fixed me with an eye glittering with triumph, and a bit too much gin:

"And the Greek month of Anthesterion is our February!"

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I looked at him thoughtfully: "I thought Pisces was a sign of the zodiac,"I murmured. "What does 'the

Path of Pisces' mean?"

He clucked his tongue, just like a lady math teacher I suffered under in the fifth grade: "The signs of the

so-called zodiac are stellar constellations, my boy!"he said reprovingly.

Then, brushing aside the ashtray and the now-empty glasses, he began to trace lines and curves on the

tablecloth with the stub of a broken pencil fished from an inner pocket.

"In February,"he said breathlessly, "the constellation passes over this belt of North Africa-thus and so-

upon this latitude-"

"Latitude 25,"I murmured, studying the rude chart he had sketched.

He tapped a bony forefinger on one particular spot.

"Here, I believe."

I mentally reconstructed the location from maps I had seen.

"The Ahaggar Mountains,"I said. "In Targa country, surrounded by Tuareg lands. One of the least

known, least explored, least visited and most completely inhospitable regions of the entire African

continent."

"Precisely."

"And just what do you expect to find there?"

His voice sank to an eerie whisper:

"A hollow mountain, leading to the center of the world."

Chapter 2. INTO THE AHAGGAR

During the next two weeks I got to know the Professor quite well. His full name-to quote a grubby,

thumbprintsmeared visiting card he flashed to overawe customs officials-read:

Professor Percival P. Potter, Ph.D.

He was suspiciously reticent on the question of what that middle initial stood for, but it was on his

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passport, which I saw by accident.

"'Penthesileia'?"I read, incredulously.

He fixed me with a frosty, reproving glare.

"You peeked."

"Well, I didn't mean to . . . but-Penthesileia?"

Professor Potter cleared his throat and gave a little sniff. "My late father was a highly esteemed classical

scholar,"he informed me coldly. "Penthesileia was the Queen of the Amazons, in an old Roman epic

about the Trojan War, by Quintus Smyrnaeus. My father was perhaps overfond of the epic, which is

minor and rather florid . . ."

I chuckled. "Your dad was also a bit overfond of alliteration,"said I with a grin at Professor Percival

Penthesileia Potter, Ph.D.

The Prof was a comical old geezer, all right, but there were a lot of good things you could say about

him, as I soon found out. For a skinny little bundle of bones I could pick up in one hand, almost, he had

enough guts and courage and boldness for fifty wildcats. During all of our adventures together-and some

of them were grueling ordeals, even for a man of my youth -I never once heard him gripe or whimper or

complain. He was resourceful, staunch, brave to the point of being foolhardy, and a good man to have at

your side when the chips were down.

He was also the smartest guy I've ever known. In fact, he knew more about more things than just about

anybody this side of Isaac Asimov. I never did quite figure out just what he was a professor of.

For some odd reason, he was rather reticent on that point. Digging around for maps and stuff in the

Cairo Museum library, I saw him sight-read a scroll written in old Coptic, and then make a critical

remark about the ancient scribe's sloppy use of diacritical marks. Impressive! But his main interest in

finding this mountain gate which (presumably) led down into Zanthodon was to search for fossils and

minerals. Strolling through another wing of the museum, he rattled off the names (you know, Latin and

Greek stuff) of all the dinosaur skeletons we passed.

"What are you, anyway, Doc?"I asked, somewhat baffled. "Here I thought you were a geologist or a

mineralogist, and now you're making noises like a-whaddayacallum-fossil hunter, dinosaur expert-"

"Paleontologist?"

"Right: paleontologist,"I nodded. "So which is it, anyway?"

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He cleared his throat with a little apologetic cough. "Well, a bit of them all, I'm afraid. A bit of a

dabbler, you know . . . "

A paleontologist and geologist, who also knows more about ancient Coptic than the old scribes who

used to write in it? Well, that was the Prof: a man of parts, as they say.

Later, as I got to know him better, I found out he had equal qualifications in archaeology, ancient

languages, and half a dozen other isms and -ologies. Quite a guy!

But I had amused him by being impressed at his scholarly attainments. He chuckled, rather pleased that

he had managed to impress me. Which he certainly had

"'Un sot toujours un plus sot qui l'admire,' "he murmured half to himself.

"Come again? That's French, I know, but . . . ?"

"A fool can always find a bigger fool to admire him,"he quipped, sardonically.

"Oh, yeah? Who says?"

"Boileau-Despreaux,"he replied smugly.

I ground my teeth, cudgeling my memory for a scrap of La Rochefoucauld I half remembered from

college:

"Says you,"I snorted. "'Il n'y pas des sots si incommodes que ceux qui ont de l'esprit'!"

He looked surprised: rather as if a pet chimpanzee had begun a critique of Einstein's math.

"'There are no fools so troublesome as those who have some wit,"' he translated. "My boy, you delight

me! A splendid put-down, and quite apropos. But I wonder if you recall Goethe's pointed remark . . .

'Wir sind gewohnt dass die Menschen verhohnen was sie nicht verstehen'?"

"Only thing I ever read by Goethe was Faust,"I had to admit. His eyes twinkled:

"But it is from Faust, my dear boy! 'We are used to see that man despises what he never comprehends.'

There, I trust that puts you in your place?"

It certainly did.

With all those "p's"in his name, I suppose he just naturally had to be a . . . polymath.

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The Ahaggar region which was our goal was many hundreds of miles to the west of Port Said; the entire

breadth of the African continent stretched between where we were and where we wanted to be.

Well, one thing was sure: I couldn't fly Babe (my affectionate pet-name for the helicopter I had

inherited, sort of, from my former partner in crime) all the way there. There's rather a noticeable lack of

filling stations in the North Sahara.

We decided to ship the Sikorsky to Morocco by a rusty old tub of a tramp steamer. The nice thing about

this was that it wouldn't cost me-or him, rather-one single pistole. This was because the fat, fiercely

mustached Turk who owned the steamer owed me a favor or three. And that was because once upon a

time we had both been smuggling guns and ammo into one of those little pepper-pot Middle East wars.

My side won; his side lost their shirts-and mostly because the ammo he sold them didn't fit the guns he

had also peddled to them.

To this day, that particular government would like very much to get their mitts on a fat guy named

Kemal Bey. And the favor I could do him was to keep my yap shut, while the favor he could do me was

to carry Babe, the Professor and me down the Mediterranean coast to Morocco. This would not be all

that hard to do, since, although Kemal's rusty old tub was hardly much bigger than one of those tugboats

they have back in New York Harbor, the chopper could be dismantled and stripped down with a little

time, a mite of effort, and a good variety of wrenches.

Kemal Bey groaned and griped and called upon his gods, but relented in the end, and did as I asked. It

would take us some weeks to sail down the coast of North Africa, through the Straits and down the west

coast past Casablanca to the little seaport town of Agadir, which was smack-dab on the thirtieth parallel,

almost.

From that point on, traveling inland, the only thing to do was fly in the chopper, which meant we had to

pack along plenty of high octane. This could be procured on the black market in Cairo easily enough,

and could be shipped in Kemal's cramped hold. Once we came ashore in Morocco, though, we would

have to fly with the gas aboard, which was a mite dangerous.

During our days and nights at sea, I did a lot of thinking about the Prof's scheme. And the more I

thought about it, the wackier it seemed. Oh, he was smart enough, but like your typical stereotype of the

absent-minded professor, nose buried in books and all, he had about as much practicality as I pack

around in the tip of my little finger. Over one of Kenal's lousy dinners-bad fish and raw onions and

undrinkable Turkish booze-I asked him the value he estimated for the fossils and rare minerals he hoped

to find in the Ahaggar.

"Value, my boy? Dollars-and-cents, you mean? Practically worthless . . . but the value to science-"

"I thought so,"I groaned.

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He looked prim. "I perceive, my boy, that you consider me a science-for-the-sake-of-science fanatic . . .

not so at all, I assure you. Fossils are worth little on the open market, that is true, unfortunately; but the

region into which we are traveling is known to contain rich fossil beds ranging from the Upper Jurassic

to the Lower Cretaceous . . . we can expect to find the remains of brachyosaurus, one of the largest of all

giant saurians, and we can hope for gigantosaurus and perhaps even dichraeosaurus . . . also iguanodonts

and even small pterosaurs. When Werner Janensch of the Berlin Museum excavated in and about those

regions back in 1909, he discovered a spectacular skeleton of brachyosaurus and discovered over fifty

specimens of kentrurosaurus, an African relative of the stegosaur."

"You've got my head swimming,"I confessed. He snorted.

"I assure you, my boy, that a well-preserved and complete skeleton of any of the above reptilia will be

an intrinsically valuable find."

"How old is this underground place you hope to discover?"I asked, more to swerve the conversation

away from all those jaw-cracking names than from any other motive.

"I believe that Zanthodon was formed in the middle of the Mesozoic, which means it has existed for

something like 150,000,000 years."

One hundred and fifty million years sounded like a lot of years to me, and I said as much. I also pointed

out that he said the Ahaggar region abounded in Jurassic and Cretaceous life forms: and now he was

talking about the Mesozoic.

He disintegrated me with a look of vitriolic contempt.

"Mighty Mendel, boy, didn't they teach you anything at University?"he snapped. "If not, then pray

permit me to inform you that the Mesozoic Era began some two hundred million years ago and

terminated about seventy million years D.C. It is divided, I will have you understand, into three major

subdivisions; and these are known as-taking the earlier period first-the Triassic, which lasted 35,000,000

years, the Jurassic, which was of similar duration, and-lastly-the Cretaceous, which extended for some

sixty million years."

"Oh,"I said in a small voice. And rapidly changed the subject entirely.

And about time, too.

So I got myself hired to go volcano-hunting and dinosaur-digging. Well, I've had worse jobs, I suppose.

Of course, I could have turned the Professor down flat when he tried to hire me. His wacky scheme

sounded dangerous and uncertain from the beginning. But, if you will recall, I had left my last

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