This is the editor again, for a final comment. Lafferty is about as uninteresting as his stories. Which is to say, not at all. As entered for the prosecution’s case against R. A.’s contention that he’s a neb, the following story, one of my particular favorites in this book.
Note: The introduction above is reproduced from its original appearance in Dangerous Visions and is © 1967 The Kilimanjaro Corporation with the kind permission of the author.
Land of the Great Horses
“They came and took our country away from us,” the people had always said. But nobody understood them.
Two Englishmen, Richard Rockwell and Seruno Smith, were rolling in a terrain buggy over the Thar Desert. It was bleak, red country, more rock than sand. It looked as though the top had been stripped off it and the naked underland left uncovered.
They heard thunder and it puzzled them. They looked at each other, the blond Rockwell and the dark Smith. It never thundered in the whole country between New Delhi and Bahawalpur. What would this rainless north India desert have to thunder with?
“Let’s ride the ridges here,” Rockwell told Smith, and he sent the vehicle into a climb. “It never rains here, but once before I was caught in a draw in a country where it never rained. I nearly drowned.”
It thundered again, heavy and rolling, as though to tell them that they were hearing right.
“This draw is named Kuti Tavdavi—Little River,” Smith said darkly. “I wonder why.”
Then he jerked back as though startled at himself.
“Rockwell, why did I say that? I never saw this draw before. How did a name like that pop into my mind? But it’s the low draw that would be a little river if it ever rained in this country. This land can’t have significant rain. There’s no high place to tip whatever moisture goes over.”
“I wonder about that every time I come,” said Rockwell, and raised his hand toward the shimmering heights—the Land of the Great Horses, the famous mirage. “If it were really there it would tip the moisture. It would make a lush savanna of all this.”
They were mineral explorers doing ground minutiae on promising portions of an aerial survey. The trouble with the Thar was that it had everything—lead, zinc, antimony, copper, tin, bauxite—in barely submarginal amounts. Nowhere would the Thar pay off, but everywhere it would almost pay.
Now it was lightning about the heights of the mirage, and they had never seen that before. It had clouded and lowered. It was thundering in rolling waves, and there was no mirage of sound.
“There is either a very large and very busy bird up there or this is rain,” Rockwell said.
And it had begun to rain, softly but steadily. It was pleasant as they chukkered along in the vehicle through the afternoon. Rain in the desert is always like a bonus.
Smith broke into a happy song in one of the northwest India tongues, a tune with a ribald swing to it, though Rockwell didn’t understand the words. It was full of double rhymes and vowel-packed words such as a child might make up.
“How the devil do you know the tongues so well?” Rockwell asked. “I find them difficult, and I have a good linguistic background.”
“I didn’t have to learn them,” Smith said, “I just had to remember them. They all cluster around the boro jib itself.”
“Around the what? How many of the languages do you know?”
“All of them. The Seven Sisters, they’re called: Punjabi, Kashmiri, Gujarati, Marathi, Sindhi, Hindi.”
“Your Seven Sisters only number six,” Rockwell jibed.
“There’s a saying that the seventh sister ran off with a horse trader,” Smith said. “But that seventh lass is still encountered here and there around the world.”
Often they stopped to survey on foot. The very color of the new rivulets was significant to the mineral men, and this was the first time they had ever seen water flow in that country. They continued on fitfully and slowly, and ate up a few muddy miles.
Rockwell gasped once and nearly fell off the vehicle. He had seen a total stranger riding beside him, and it shook him.
Then he saw that it was Smith as he had always been, and he was dumbfounded by the illusion. And, soon, by something else.
“Something is very wrong here,” Rockwell said.
“Something is very right here,” Smith answered him, and then broke into another song in an Indian tongue.
“We’re lost,” Rockwell worried out loud. “We can’t see any distance for the rain, but there shouldn’t be rising ground here. It isn’t mapped.”
“Of course it is,” Smith sang. “It’s the Jalo Char.”
“The what? Where did you get a name like that? The map’s a blank here, and the country should be.”
“Then the map is defective. Man, it’s the sweetest valley in the world! It will lead us all the way up. How could the map forget it? How could we all forget it for so long?”
“Smith! What’s wrong? You’re pie-eyed.”
“Everything’s right, I tell you. I was reborn just a minute ago. It’s a coming home.”
“Smith! We’re riding through green grass.”
“I love it. I could crop it like a horse.”
“That cliff, Smith! It shouldn’t be that close! It’s part of the mir—”
“Why, sir, that is Lolo Trusul.”
“But it’s not real! It’s not on any topography map!”
“Map, sir? I’m a poor kalo man who wouldn’t know about things like that.”
“Smith! You’re a qualified cartographer!”
“Does seem that I followed a trade with a name like that. But the cliff is real enough. I climbed it in my boyhood—in my other boyhood. And that yonder, sir, is Drapengoro Rez—the Grassy Mountain. And the high plateau ahead of us which we begin to climb is Diz Boro Grai—the Land of the Great Horses.”
Rockwell stopped the terrain buggy and leaped off. Smith followed him in a happy daze.
“Smith, you’re wide-eyed crazy!” Rockwell gasped. “And what am I? We’re terribly lost somehow. Smith, look at the log chart and the bearings recorder!”
“Log chart, sir? I’m a poor kalo man who wouldn’t know—”
“Damn you, Smith, you made these instruments. If they’re correct we’re seven hundred feet too high and have been climbing for ten miles into a highland that’s supposed to be part of a mirage. These cliffs can’t be here. We can’t be here. Smith!”
But Seruno Smith had ambled off like a crazy man.
“Smith, where are you trotting off to? Can’t you hear me?”
“You call to me, sir?” asked Smith. “And by such a name?”
“Are the two of us as crazy as the country?” Rockwell moaned. “I’ve worked with you for three years. Isn’t your name Smith?”
“Why, yes, sir, I guess it might be englished as Horse-Smith or Black-Smith. But my name is Pettalangro and I’m going home.”
And the man who had been Smith started on foot up to the Land of the Great Horses.
“Smith, I’m getting on the buggy and I’m going back,” Rockwell shouted. “I’m scared liverless of this country that changes. When a mirage turns solid it’s time to quit. Come along now! We’ll be back in Bikaner by tomorrow morning. There’s a doctor there, and a whiskey bar. We need one of them.”