The Book of Skulls

chapter eighteen Eli

They were right to choose this cruel and shriveled terrain as the site of the skullhouse. Ancient cults need a setting of mystery and romantic remoteness if they are to maintain themselves against the clashing, twanging resonances of the skeptical, materialistic twentieth century. A desert is ideal. Here the air is painfully blue, the soil is a thin burnt crust over a rocky shield, the plants and trees are twisted, thorny, bizarre. Time stands still in a place like this. The modern world can neither intrude nor defile. The old gods can thrive. The old chants rise skyward, undamped by the roar of traffic and the clatter of machines. When I told this to Ned he disagreed; the desert is stagy and obvious, he said, even a little campy, and the proper place for such survivors of antiquity as the Keepers of the Skulls is the heart of a busy city, where the contrast between their texture and ours would be greatest. Say, a brownstone on East 63rd Street, where the priests could go complacently about their rites cheek by jowl with art galleries and poodle parlors. Another possibility, he suggested, would be a one-story brick-and-plate-glass factory building in a suburban industrial park devoted to the manufacture of air-conditioners and office equipment. Contrast is everything, Ned said. Incongruity is essential. The secret of art lies in attaining a sense of proper juxtapositions, and what is religion if not a category of art? But I think Ned was putting me on, as usual. In any case I can’t buy his theories of contrast and juxtaposition. This desert, this dry wasteland, is the perfect place for the headquarters of those who will not die.

Crossing from New Mexico into southern Arizona we left the last traces of winter behind. Up by Albuquerque the air had been cool, even cold, but the elevation is greater there. The land dipped as we drove toward the Mexican border and made our Phoenixward turn. The temperature rose sharply, from the fifties into the seventies, or even higher. The mountains were lower and seemed to be made of particles of reddish-brown soil compressed into molds and sprayed with glue; I imagined I could rub a deep hole in such rock with a fingertip. Soft, vulnerable, sloping hills, practically naked. Martian-looking. Different vegetation here, too. Instead of dark sweeps of sagebrush and gnarled little pines, we now traveled through forests of widely spaced giant cacti surging ithyphallically out of the brown,‘ scaly earth. Ned botanized for us. Those are saguaros, he said, those big-armed cacti taller than telephone poles, and these, the shrubby spiky-branched blue-green leafless trees that might have been native to some other planet, these are palo verde, and those, the knobby upthrust clusters of jointed woody branches, they call that ocotillo. Ned knows the Southwest well. Feels quite at home here, having spent some time in New Mexico a couple of summers ago. Feels quite at home everywhere, Ned. Likes to speak of the international fraternity of the gay; wherever he goes, he’s sure of finding lodging and companionship among His Own Kind. I envy him sometimes. It might be worth all the peripheral traumas of being gay in a straight society to know that there are places where you’re always welcome, for no other reason than that you’re a child of the tribe. My own tribe isn’t quite as hospitable.

We crossed the state border and zoomed westward toward Pheonix, the land becoming more mountainous again for a while, the terrain less forbidding. Indian country here — Pimas. We caught a glimpse of Coolidge Dam: memories of third-grade geography lessons. When we were still a hundred miles east of Phoenix, we began to see billboards inviting, no, commanding, us to stay at a downtown motel: “Have a Happy Holiday in the Valley of the Sun.” The sun already impinged on us, here in late afternoon, hanging suspended over the windshield and hurling bolts of red-gold fire into our eyes. Oliver, driving like a robot, produced glittering silvered wraparound sunglasses and kept right on going. We shot through a town called Miami. No beaches, no matrons in mink. The air was purple and pink from the fumes belching out of smokestacks; the odor of the atmosphere was sheer Auschwitz. What were they cremating here? Just before the central part of the town we saw the huge gray battleship-shaped mound of a copper mine’s discards, the great heap of tailings flung up across many years. A gaudy giant motel was right across the highway from it, I suppose for the benefit of those who dig close-up views of environmental rape. What they cremate here is Mother Nature. Sickened, we hurried on, into uninhabited territory. Saguaro, palo verde, ocotillo. We swooped through a long mountain tunnel. Forlorn townless countryside. Lengthening shadows. Heat, heat, heat. And then, abruptly, the tentacles of urban life reaching out from still-distant Phoenix: suburbs, shopping centers, gas stations, trading posts selling Indian souvenirs, motels, neon lights, fast-food stands offering tacos, custard, hot dogs, fried chicken, roast beef sandwiches. Oliver was persuaded to stop and we had tacos under eerie yellow streetlamps. And onward. The gray slabs of immense windowless department stores flanking the road. This was money country, the home of the affluent. I was a stranger in a strange land, poor disorientated alienated Yidling from the Upper West Side whizzing through the cactus and the palm trees. So very far from home. These flat towns, these glistening one-story bank buildings of green glass with psychedelic plastic signs. Pastel houses, pink and green stucco. Land that has never known snow. American flags aflutter. Love it or leave it, Mac! Main Street, Mesa, Arizona. The University of Arizona Experimental Farm right up against the highway. Far-off mountains glooming in the blue dusk. Now we are on Apache Boulevard in the town of Tempe. Wheels screeching; road turns. And suddenly we are in the desert. No streets, no billboards, nothing: no-man’s-land. Dark lumpy shapes on our left: hills, mountains. Headlights visible, far away. A few minutes more and the desolation ends; we have crossed from Tempe into Phoenix and now are on Van Buren Street. Shops, houses, motels. “Keep going till we’re downtown,” Timothy says. His family, it seems, has a major financial stake in one of the inner-city motels; well stay there. Ten minutes more, through a district of secondhand bookshops and five-dollar-a-night motor lodges, and we are downtown. Skyscrapers here, ten or twelve stories: bank buildings, a newspaper office, large hotels. The heat is fantastic, close to ninety degrees. This is late March; what is the weather like in August? Here is our motel. Statue of a camel out front. Big palm tree. Cramped, ungenerous lobby. Timothy registers. We’ll have a suite. Second floor, in back. A swimming pool. “Who’s for a swim?” Ned asks. “And then a Mexican dinner,” says Oliver. Our spirits bubble. This is Phoenix, after all. We’re actually here. We’ve almost reached our goal. Tomorrow we set out to the north in quest of the retreat of the Keepers of the Skulls.

It seems like years since all this began. That passing reference, offhand, casual, in the Sunday newspaper. A “monastery” in the desert, not far north of Phoenix, where twelve or fifteen “monks” practice some private brand of so-called Christianity. “They came up from Mexico about twenty years ago, and are believed to have gone to Mexico from Spain about the time of Cortes. Economically self-sufficient, they keep to themselves and do not encourage visitors, though they are cordial and civil to anyone who stumbles into ‘their isolated, cactus-encircled retreat. The decor is strange, a combination of medieval Christian style and what seems to be Aztec motifs. A predominant symbol that gives the monastery a stark, even grotesque, appearance is the human skull. Skulls are everywhere, grinning, somber, in high relief or in three-dimensional representation. One long frieze of skull images seems patterned after designs to be seen at Chichen Itza, Yucatan. The monks are lean, intense men, their skins tanned and toughened by exposure to desert sun and wind. They seem, oddly enough, both old and young at once. The one I spoke to, who declined to give his name, might have been thirty years old or three hundred, it was impossible to tell…”

Only an accident that I happened to notice that as I glanced randomly through the newspaper’s travel supplement. Only an accident that bits of strange imagery — that frieze of skulls, those old-young faces — lodged in my mind. Only an accident that I should, a few days later, come upon the manuscript of the Book of Skulls in the university library.

Our library has a geruza, a storehouse of culls and curios, of scraps of manuscript, of apocrypha and oddities that nobody had bothered to translate, decipher, classify, or even examine in any detail. I suppose every great university must have a similar repository, rilled with a miscellanea of documents acquired through bequest or unearthed on expeditions, awaiting an eventual (twenty years? rifty7) scrutiny of scholars. Ours is more copiously stocked then most, perhaps because for three generations our empire-building librarians have been hungrily acquisitive, piling up the treasures of antiquity faster than any battalion of scholars could cope with the accessions. In such a system certain items invariably are laid aside, inundated by the torrent of new acquisitions, and eventually are hidden, forgotten, orphaned. So we have cluttered shelves of Sumerian and Babylonian cuneiform documents, most of them unearthed during our celebrated digs in southern Mesopotamia in 1902-05; we have whole barrels of untouched papyri of the later dynasties; we have pounds of material from Iraqi synagogues, not only Torah scrolls but also marriage contracts, court decisions, leases, poetry; we have inscribed sticks of tamarisk wood from the caves of Tun-huang, a neglected gift from Aurel Stein long ago; we have cases of parish records from the moldy muniment rooms of cold Yorkshire castles; we have scraps and strips of pre-Columbian Mexican codices; we have stacks of hymns and masses from fourteenth-century monasteries in the Pyrenees. For all anyone knows, our library may hold a Rosetta Stone to unlock the secrets of the Mohenjo-daro script, it may have the Emperor Claudius’ textbook of Etruscan grammar, it may contain, uncatalogued, the memoirs of Moses or the diary of John the Baptist. Those discoveries, if they are to be made at all, will be made by other prowlers in the dim, dusty storage tunnels beneath the main library building. But I was the one who found the Book of Skulls.

Wasn’t looking for it. Hadn’t ever heard of it. Wangled permission to go into the storage vaults in quest of a collection of manuscripts of Catalan mystic verse, thirteenth-century, supposedly obtained from the Barcelonian dealer in antiquities, Jaime Maura Gudiol, in 1893. Professor Vasquez Ocafia, with whom I’m supposedly collaborating on a group of translations from the Catalan, had heard about the Maura hoard from his professor, thirty or forty years ago, and had some vague memories of having handled a few of the actual manuscripts. By checking faded accession cards in nineteenth-century sepia ink, I succeeded in learning where in the storage vaults the Maura collection was likely to be found, and went looking. Dark room; sealed boxes; an infinity of cardboard folders; no luck. Coughing, choking in the dust My fingers blackened, my face grimy. We’ll try one more box and call it quits. And then: a stiff red paper binder containing a handsome illuminated manuscript on sheets of fine vellum. Richly embellished title: Liber Calvarium. The Book of Skulls. A fascinating title, sinister, romantic. I turned a page. Elegant uncial lettering in a clear, bold hand of the tenth or eleventh century, the words not in Latin but in a heavily Latinate Catalan, which I automatically translated. Hear this, O Nobly-Born: life eternal we offer thee. The damnedest incipit I had ever encountered. Had I made a mistake? No. Life eternal we offer thee. The page held a paragraph of text, the rest of it not so easy to decipher as the incipit; along the bottom of the page and up the left side Were eight beautifully painted human skulls, each set off from the next by a border of columns and a little Romanesque vault. Only one skull still had its lower jaw. One was tipped on its side. But all were grinning, and there was mischief in their shadowy eye-sockets: face after face saying, from beyond the grave, It would do you some good to learn the things we have come to know.

I sat down on a box of old parchments and leafed quickly through the manuscript. Twelve sheets or so, all embellished with grotesqueries of the grave — crossed thigh-bones, toppled tombstones, a disembodied pelvis or two, and skulls, skulls, skulls, skulls. Translating it on the spot was beyond me; much of the vocabulary was obscure, being neither Latin nor Catalan but some dreamy, flickering intermediate language. Yet the broad sense of what I had found quickly came clear. The text was addressed to some prince by the abbot of a monastery under his protection and was, essentially, an invitation to the prince to withdraw from the mundane world in order to partake of the “mysteries” of the monastic order. The disciplines of the monks, the abbot said, were aimed toward the defeat of Death, by which he meant not the triumph of the spirit in the next world but rather the triumph of the body in this one. Life eternal we offer thee. Contemplation, spiritual and physical exercises, proper diet, and so forth — these were the gateways to everlasting life.

An hour of sweaty toil gave me these passages:

“The First Mystery is this: that the skull lieth beneath the face, as death lieth alongside life. But, O Nobly-Born, there is no paradox in this, for death is the companion of life, life is the messenger of death. If one could but reach through the face to the underlying skull and befriend it, one might [unintelligible]…

“The Sixth Mystery is this: that our gift shall always be despised, that we shall ever be fugitives among men, so that we flee from place to place, from the caves of the north to the caves of the south, from the [uncertain] of the fields to the [uncertain] of the city, and so has it been in the hundreds of years of my life and the hundreds of years of my forebears…

“The Ninth Mystery is this: that the price of a life must always be a life. Know, O Nobly-Born, that eternities must be balanced by extinctions, and therefore we ask of thee that the ordinated balance be gladly sustained. Two of thee we undertake to admit to our fold. Two must go into darkness. As by living we daily die, so then by dying we shall forever live. Is there one among thee who will relinquish eternity for his brothers of the four-sided figure, so that they may come to comprehend the meaning of self-denial? And is there one among thee whom his comrades are prepared to sacrifice, so that they may come to comprehend the meaning of exclusion? Let the victims choose themselves. Let them define the quality of their lives by the quality of their departures…”

There was more, eighteen Mysteries in all, plus a peroration in absolutely opaque verse. I was captured. It was the intrinsic fascination of the text that caught me, its somber beauty, its ominous embellishments, its gonglike rhythms, rather than any immediate connection with that Arizona monastery. Taking the manuscript from the library was impossible, of course, but I went upstairs, emerging from the vaults like Banquo’s grimy ghost, and arranged for the use of a study cubicle deep in the recesses of the stacks. Then I went home and bathed, saying nothing to Ned about my discovery, though he saw I was preoccupied with something. And returned to the library armed with notepaper, pencils, my own dictionaries. The manuscript was already on my assigned desk. Until ten that evening, until closing time, I wrestled with it in my badly lit cloister. Yes, no doubt of it: these Spaniards were claiming a technique for attaining immortality. The manuscript gave no actual clues to their processes, but merely insisted that they were successful. There was much symbology of the-skull-beneath-the-face; for a life-oriented cult, they were greatly attracted to the imagery of the grave. Perhaps that was the necessary discontinuity, the sense of jarring juxtapositions, that Ned makes so much of in his esthetic theories. The text made it plain that some of these skull-worshipping monks, if not all, had survived for centuries. (Even for thousands of years? An ambiguous passage in the Sixteenth Mystery implied a lineage older than the pharaohs.) Their longevity evidently earned them the resentment of the mortals around them, the peasants and shepherds and baronr; many times had they moved their headquarters, seeking always a place where they could practice their exercises in peace.

Three days of hard work gave me a reliable translation of perhaps 85 percent of the text and a working understanding of the rest. I did it mostly by myself, though I consulted Professor Vasquez Ocana about some of the more troublesome phrases, concealing from him, however, the nature of my project. (When he asked if I had found the Maura Gudiol cache I replied vaguely.) At this point I still thought of the whole thing as a charming fantasy. I had read Lost Horizon when I was a boy; I remembered Shangri-la, the secret monastery in the Himalayas, the monks practicing yoga and breathing pure air, that wonderful shocker of a line, “That you are still alive, Father Perrault.” One didn’t take such stuff seriously. I visualized myself publishing my translation in, say. Speculum, with appropriate commentary on the medieval belief in immortality, references to the Prester John my-thos, to Sir John Mandeville, to the Alexander romances. The Brotherhood of the Skulls, the Keepers of the Skulls who are its high priests, the Trial which must be undergone by four simultaneous candidates, only two of whom are permitted to survive, the hint of ancient mysteries passed down across millennia — why, this might have been some tale told by Sheherazade, might it not? I went to the trouble of carefully checking Burton’s version of the Thousand Nights and a Night, all sixteen volumes, thinking that the Moors might have brought this tale of skulls to Catalonia in the eighth or ninth century. No. Whatever I had found, it was no free-floating fragment of the Arabian Nights. Perhaps part of the Charlemagne cycle, then? Or some unattributed Romanesque yarn? I prowled through bulky indices of medieval mythological motifs. Nothing. I went further back. I became an expert on the whole literature of immortality and longevity, all in a single week. Tithonus, Methuselah, Gilgamesh, the Uttarakurus and the Jambu tree, the fisherman Glaukus, the Taoist immortals, yes, the whole bibliography. And then, the burst of insight, the pounding of the forehead, the wild shout that brought student couriers running from all corners of the stacks. Arizona! Monks who came from Mexico and before that went to Mexico from Spain! The frieze of skulls! I hunted for that article in the Sunday supplement again. Read it in a kind of delirium. Yes. “Skulls are everywhere, grinning, somber, in high relief or in three-dimensional representation… The monks are lean, intense men… The one I spoke to . . • might have been thirty years old or three hundred, it was impossible to tell.” That you are still alive, Father Perrault. My astounded soul recoiled. Could I believe such things? I, skeptic, scoffer, materialist, pragmatist? Immortality? An age-old cult? Could such a thing be? The Keepers of the Skulls thriving among the cactus? The whole thing no myth of the medievals, no legend, but an actual continuing establishment that has penetrated even our automated world, one which I could visit whenever I chose to make the trip? Offering myself as candidate. Undergoing the Trial. Eli Steinfeld living to see the dawn of the thirty-sixth century. It was beyond all plausibility. I rejected the juxtaposition of manuscript and newspaper article as a wild coincidence; then, meditating, I succeeded in rejecting my rejection; and then I moved beyond that toward acceptance. It was necessary for me to make a formal act of faith, the first I had ever achieved, in order to begin to accept it. I compelled myself to agree that there could be powers outside the comprehension of contemporary science. I forced myself to shed a lifelong habit of dismissing the unknown until it has been made known by rigorous proofs. I allied myself willingly and gladly with the flying saucerites, with the Atlanteans, with the scientologists, with the flat-earthers, with the Forteans, with the macrobioticists, with the astrologers, with that whole legion of the credulous in whose company I had rarely felt comfortable before. At last I believed. I believed fully, though allowing for the possibility of error. I believed. Then I told Ned, and, after a while, Oliver and Timothy. Dangling the bait before them. Life eternal we offer thee. And here we are in Phoenix. Palm trees, cactus, the camel outside the motel: here we are. Tomorrow to commence the final phase of our quest for the House of Skulls.