“If Huang was good, and if he translated it straight from the original Dusseldorf edition, the one Gottfried Mülder printed, this could be treasure!”
I was hoping that Huang Jing had added a lot between von Junzt’s chapters, a lot that was only known in China. Friedrich von Junzt had returned from Mongolia a very different man to the one who’d begun that last journey, and he hadn’t survived long. He’d been strangled in a locked tower room in his own ancestral castle. No-one had seen the assassin come or go. It was part of his legend that the marks on his throat had been made by fingers that weren’t human.
Nameless Cults, or Von Unaussprechlichen Kulten, had nothing in it about Mongolia or the Plateau of Leng. The German spent the final months of his life penning an account of his last journey at a frenzied rate. His last friend, Alexis Ladeau, was supposedly the only person ever to read it, just after von Junzt was murdered. Having done that, Ladeau burned it and crushed the ashes to powder. Then he cut his own throat.
Aside from Ladeau, only Gottfried Mülder, the Baron von Junzt’s printer, would have been in a position to know anything from von Junzt himself about that final expedition. Mülder wrote that von Junzt had absolutely claimed to him and Ladeau that Leng was a real place, it existed, and he had reached it, seen horrors there of which the Tcho-Tcho tribe and its stomachturning customs was the least, and escaped alive with a number of relics, including rock samples which the printer described in detail — and they were exactly like the ones I’d been testing. The ones that supposedly had come to Miskatonic from a castle near Dusseldorf.
Leng. It’s variously said to be a mythical version of Tibet, a lesser plateau in Qinghai, a remote highland in the southern Gobi, and even a region of the dreamlands! Legends or not, though, if there was an actual place called Leng in the world, and it was the source of those rock samples, it could write an entire new chapter in geological history. Because their content said they were forty-two hundred million years old.
No rocks verifiably that old had ever been found, much less strata. We haven’t even discovered any minerals of that age, except for minute zircon crystals. They’ve been dated by the uranium to lead decay rate. They’re never found in the rocks that originally contained them, though. Those have been eroded, crushed, heated, buried in sediment, incorporated into metamorphic rock, and much else through eons, the microscopic crystals surviving it all. Zircon is tough.
I hadn’t settled it yet. Still, those rocks appeared to be as old as the zircon crystals in them, which would make them primeval past belief, and somehow untouched by the eons. I kept telling myself, as an inoculation against disappointment, that it was most likely a mistake, a false alarm, and I’d have to wait on publication and review.
For that, I’d have to find and prove the samples’ source, which looked like a difficult job. Essential, though. I couldn’t see myself making much headway in the scientific world with a claim that the rocks had been brought from the Far East by a bizarre eccentric of the early nineteenth century, not even a geologist, who said they came from a very likely mythic plateau.
“Roy, don’t look so perplexed,” Connie said, punching my shoulder lightly. “Maybe there’s a way you can learn more. If you’ll open your mind just a bit. Those dreams of yours. Are you still having them?”
“Had another one last night,” I admitted.
“They began when you started handling those rocks, analyzing them. I think you should consult the team that did those psychometry experiments here. See what sort of results you get holding those rocks while under hypnosis.”
“Connie, I’m a bad subject for hypnosis, the worst. I’ve about as much psychic sensitivity as one of those rocks myself! And psychometry — it’s never been confirmed that there is such a thing, no offence.”
“The experiments weren’t conclusive, I know. They never are. But a couple showed results, and it has been known to happen in history. That tenth-century Irish monk who wrote the Nemedian Chronicles did it after a series of visions at Saint Brigid’s shrine outside Cologne, and he had the visions while he was gripping a chalice from that prehistoric kingdom of Nemedia in his hands!”
“Whoa!” I said helplessly. “Don’t go too far into left field, Connie. You mean he believed that chalice came from ancient Nemedia. I know it’s a real tenth-century manuscript, but Prester John’s letter was real too — a real twelfth-century fabrication, that is. Or was it fourteenth?”
“Who cares?” Connie said, a bit nettled. “Doesn’t matter. Psychometry sometimes works. It’s worth a try.”
“It’s a very long shot. Besides, those prehistoric kingdoms were supposed to be destroyed in a cataclysm that changed the whole face of the earth, Connie, and that just couldn’t be. Not so recently.”
“Just remember who discovered the Nemedian Chronicles when they’d been forgotten for centuries. It was von Junzt, poking around in one of the Gaelic monasteries Irish monks founded on the continent, as a young man! It made his name. Whatever else he was, he wasn’t any trifler. He traveled everywhere except South America and Antarctica, and met everybody from the brothers Grimm to Marie Laveau and Lobachevsky. Von Junzt took the Chronicles seriously, Roy.”
I came close to saying that in the nineteenth century they’d taken phrenology seriously, too. I bit the words back. Connie’s a beautiful person, we’d been lovers when we were first at Miskatonic, she’s a good friend, and she’d cried on my shoulder the time a sorry specimen of jerkdom hurt her badly.
Just the same…
I said cautiously, “He was quite a fellow, yes. But I do know my own field, Connie. Here’s just one thing. I’ve read the Chronicles. They say the whole of West Africa was heaved up from the bottom of the sea at the time! West African rocks are basically Pre-Cambrian. There’s no possible way they could’ve been installed where they are just twenty thousand years ago.”
Crustal convulsions like that would have darkened the sky for a hundred years, probably made the atmosphere unbreathable and wiped out the higher forms of life, besides.
Connie bristled.
“Thank you so damn much for mansplaining that to me. I appreciate it. Especially after I found the Kˇepà Bùluò De Shuˉ for you, and am going to read it for you too, you illiterate! It’s not as if I have my own work to do!”
“Connie, I appreciate that! I’m grateful. I owe you. But I can’t back down—”
“No. You certainly can’t. Just sit and listen a minute, Orlanski, because I’m about to go from left field to total craziness. Okay?”
“All right,” I said resignedly.
“I know all that,” she said, a bit red in the face. Ire, not embarrassment. “I knew it in high school, for God’s sake. But I think a little deeper than just physical facts! If a cataclysm like that actually happened, it couldn’t have been merely physical. Geological. But suppose there were dislocations in time as well as upheavals in the crust? Gigantic ones? A decade stretched into millions of years, for instance, where West Africa was concerned? Even hundreds of millions? Something like it east and south of Wallace’s Line, too, accounting for the fauna and rock formations there? Leng might have changed geologically a lot less than other regions did. If that’s rubbish, it leaves you still trying to explain those rocks and figure out where von Junzt got them, doesn’t it?”