“I have been grinding away at fact for 30 years; it is time for fancies.”
Novel of the Black Seal, Arthur Machen [1]
No one really cares about the desert. It is hot, way too cold at night, sand gets everywhere, and water is scarcer than whales on a mountaintop. But it is in the desert that secrets are covered by the grains of time. Deep within the Gobi desert, within the dunes themselves, lays a structure – the apex of Mongolian and Manchu cultural collaboration. It is an average object to those who have encountered it. Just a rock in the sand. But it is far more than that.
It is a stone that is attached to another stone, which is connected to another. This sequence goes on for the width of the desert, from the far east of Mongolia to as far as Xinjiang in western China. No one really knows what it is for or how it works. All you need to do is lift one small stone – black as obsidian, coarse as granite, and about five to six pounds – and up come the others, for thousands of miles. Out of curiosity, Mary, a graduate student in geology from Penn State, got a grant from Stanford in collaboration with Tsinghua University in Beijing to base herself at an oasis in Inner Mongolia, on the border of Alxa and Ordos. She survived the long journey from Philadelphia to Toronto, to Beijing, and then to Yinchuan, not to mention a long bus ride to a base where a jeep picked her up and speedily brought her on a rollercoaster ride through the dunes to her new home for the summer.
Mary is short, standing at four feet and ten inches, and blonde like her mother, a Russian immigrant. The locals were very interested in her because many of them had never met a blonde before. Her translator, Gaomei, a six foot two geology student from Tsinghua, helped her find the mysterious rock just inside the Ordos desert. It was nothing special; it had a marble-like vein running through a dusty-gray body. When Mary lifted the stone she could see other stones at a distance raise as if some vacuous presence temporarily broke the laws of gravity. She looked to her companion. There was clearly an air of worry.
Gaomei stayed to hold up the stone as Mary went to the next nearest stone about fifty feet away. It looked more or less the same. She took a chisel to it and broke off a small piece to examine more closely. Just then Gaomei decide to drop the stone and all of the stones across the great Gobi floated softly back down into the sand. All except the one she was near, which rose at least twelve feet high and stayed there. She was going to see if the locals could bring her a ladder, but darkness fell as a stone normally does.
“Come on. It’s time for bed. Can’t you tell it’s late?” said Gaomei as she walked over to Mary.
Mary made note of the fact that Gaomei used an oddly American dialect of English.
“Yeah, I just… it got dark really, really fast, is all.”
Gaomei brought her back to camp and set her up in a circular hut of traditional Mongolian make. The outside was a white hide tied up with red rope. The walls were thick and helped to stave off the cold of the desert night. Above her bed was a taxidermy ibex head.
As Mary slept in her bed she could hear Gaomei shouting in what she guessed was the local Mongolian dialect (she could tell it was not Mandarin). It was confusing to her because nothing she had studied in her lifetime could explain what the stones did earlier in the day. Gaomei did not seem to mind or even care, though Mary had no idea what all the shouting was about. Maybe the locals just liked to shout. Mary had thought it would be exciting to play with the arcane, but now she realized that not being able to understand something was in actuality her worst fear. This was her first original research where she could not just ask her professors if she was right. If she could not find an answer, perhaps no one could. She fell asleep even with the shouting that appeared would not end.
The next morning Gaomei woke her with a group of smaller local men who eyed her oddly. It was probably because they had not seen a blonde before, she thought.
“What’s going on, Gaomei? Did something happen in the night?”
Gaomei leaned forward, her large black eyes shadowy in the unlit tent, and said, “I know how the stones work.”
“What? How? We just got here.”
“These locals didn’t want to tell me but I shouted it out of them. I even had to arm wrestle one of them.” She eyed a man on her left who avoided her glance. She simpered. “That punk’s got no muscle at all.”
“How does it work?”
“Let me show you.”
Mary changed out of her pajamas and they took some camels out to where they had observed the stone the previous day. Things were going a little too fast for Mary’s liking, she thought. It seemed as if her adventure was on fast forward. Not but a few hours ago she had been scared of these stones and their breaking of the physical laws. Now there was apparently some use for them, some purpose that would be accessible by a secret that the locals knew about. She knew that if the locals knew about it then it could not be that magical; otherwise, they would have toted it to the world for fame and money, or something like that. Still, she felt like she was being relentlessly pushed to a conclusion when she would rather enjoy the journey as long as possible.
Gaomei shouted at the locals and they all dismounted, forming a circle around the stone Mary had lifted the previous day. They kowtowed in unison, saying something in a language that Mary could not identify.
“They are performing an ancient ritual,” said Gaomei. “Right now they are chanting in Manchu, the language of the Qing Dynastic emperors.”
Soon they were swaying and slowly standing up, changing into a second language, which Mary could tell was their local Mongolian dialect. The chant continued to oscillate between Manchu and Mongolian as they rose. When they finally rose to their straightened posture they all aimed their heads in a final bow to the stone. They held this stance for about a minute without saying a word.
Mary looked over to Gaomei, who did not look back.
“Naash ir!” they screamed.
Nothing happened at once. The silence was almost stifling as minute after minute passed. Mary looked at their faces and saw no hint of emotion or character. Gaomei seemed to have grown another foot tall. But soon the sky darkened as the stone and all connected to it rose off of the ground and into the blackening air. (Mary began to wonder how she could see all these stones if they do in fact spread across all of the Gobi Desert.) It stayed light enough that Mary could see what was happening. The stones were going higher and higher until she could barely see them any longer. But when they were about to go out of sight, they began to come back down. This time, however, the far away stones came in toward the stone the locals had chanted around. They formed a massive circle floating in the sky, and when the loop was solidified, something began to appear.
Sparks flew from the circle, lighting the sky, and at once three large tentacles protruded, reaching around as if in search for something. Mary shuddered and could hardly believe what she was seeing. She turned around to run, but Gaomei grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back.
“Don’t worry. It’s harmless. They told me so. It’s not as horrible as it seems.”
“But it has eyes on its tentacles!”
“No it doesn’t. You’re reading those into it. They’re just tentacles. Not even a body yet.”
“But! . . .”
“They told me last night once I beat that guy that this is what happens. They don’t know why, but it does. Some think that this is the leviathan that they speak of in the Bible, but even these locals don’t know. This can only happen once every twenty to forty years, hence why the stones have been able to stay hidden from us so long.”
Mary called bullshit.
“So it will just close and then they will do this again in about forty years? Really?”
“Yes.”
“I know that it is hard to write about stuff, but Writer could at least put a little more effort when telling my story than –”
Mary fell off a cliff which may or may not have been buried within the dunes of the Gobi. The tragedy was upsetting for all the characters, though Gaomei did not seem to care very much, because – after all – someone had to become the new lead.
[1] Machen, Arthur. The White People and Other Weird Stories. Ed. S. T. Joshi. New York: Penguin Books, 2011. 37. Print.
Gobi | Copyright 2016
AARON RECORDS 