Thunderer Read Online Free PDF Page A

described Ararat thusly:

    ARARAT:
The sacred city, the gods’ great perpetual work, the city of a thousand lords; but you know this. It’s everything you may see from your window, and much that’s beyond your sight, and more that is cruelly buried. Everything written here was written first in its streets, but here it is given meaning and order.
    Everything that is true of Ararat somewhere is a lie somewhere else. We shall try to do it justice in the pages before and behind us, but we crave your indulgence for our errors. If it’s truth that angers you, we are not sorry.

    …which entry, penned partly by Holbach, partly by the playwright Liancourt, was of course a little joke, for Ararat was the subject of the entire Atlas, and even all its many volumes couldn’t hope to capture it: it was as absurd as trying to contain the Atlas itself within a single one of its entries.
    Ararat’s poets and votaries, the boosters of its business and the toadies to its rulers, struck a less ambivalent tone. This was
Ararat,
they hymned: blessed, haunted Ararat! First among cities, heart and also summit of the world; ancient beyond reckoning, but rebuilding itself a million times a day, stone and brick and iron, flesh and dreams, all of it woven, unpicked, and rewoven by the crisscrossing paths of a thousand divinities: a condensation of meaning into city-stuff, gleaming and proud. How very pale and thin the rest of the world seems next to Ararat! Let those who can sing its praises; but at the docks, on Gies Landing, Arjun just sat on his pack in the rain, between two stinking fish stalls and a juggling clown in smearing snakeskin facepaint, and he asked himself what the
fuck,
a crude and dissonant curse he had picked up at sea and disliked, but some dissonance was, he felt, required here, what the
fuck
he was doing.
    His mission had propelled him over the sea, and across half the world, but now he thought he had never, throughout his long journey, allowed himself to look directly at that mission, never seen how vague and obscure of implementation it really was. Now he was in the city, and it was time to begin, and he did not know how.
And what if I’m wrong? What if it simply isn’t here?
He had only a little money left and no place to stay.
    The people who surged and jostled him and bellowed and tried to sell him things were mostly light-skinned; almost eerily pale, some of them. City-folk did not get enough sun. Others were dark or at least grime-blackened. The golden-brown of Arjun’s skin appeared unique, and he attracted curious and possibly hostile stares, which he met with a polite smile and a sinking heart.
    After a little while, the rain drove the clown off. Sheltered under a green awning, Arjun took his pen from his pack and unfolded a sheet of paper. Resting it on the hard back of his copy of Girolamo’s
Techniques,
he started to write:
Fathers, Mothers, I have come to the city, at the end of summer, over the sea, bringing our hopes with me
.
             
    L ike Ararat, Gad sat in the shadow of mountains. It was far to the south, almost at the other end of the world. Its farms were on stony earth, under dark moss and purple heather. The air in Gad was very clear and cold. Sound carried far there. Perhaps that was why the first settlers had been able to hear the Voice.
    The Choristry was the only building of any size in Gad, or for miles around. It stood in the middle of town. It was built like a wheel, topped by a shallow dome. Four spires rose at the compass points. A fifth rose from the dome’s center, higher than the others. Its walls were made of a dark mountain stone, carved and silvered in somber and abstract designs. Ample windows opened its contemplative silence to the mountain light.
    The town of Gad sloped out down the hill, under curving roofs of thatch and clay, bowed as if in worship around the Choristry. Its roads were narrow and tangled, the widest of them barely enough for the carts that came in