The Magic Circle by Katherine Neville (top 10 books of all time txt) 📕

were the Aral and the Caspian, the main watercourses the Oxus and the Indus, and the mountain ranges the Hindu Kush, the Pamirs, and the Himalayas. The only lines drawn in were dotted ones that might designate major travel routes. A few circles were drawn indicating geographical features—a few recognizable ones like Mount Everest. But it was hard to guess others without those artificial demarcations designating national boundaries we’re so accustomed to. Anticipating this, Dacian unfolded a sheet of translucent tissue marking the present boundaries and laid it over the map so the separate regions again leapt to life.

“So many people have lived here over the centuries, it blurs one’s awareness of what is important,” he explained. “These circles on the map are sites of legendary, even magical significance that transcend political changes. For instance, here.”

He indicated a spot where a podlike protrusion of Afghanistan slipped between two mountainous regions of Russian Tajikistan and Pakistan in a long, extended flow that reached out to touch westernmost China.

“It’s surely no accident,” said Dacian, “that the first of the major upheavals announcing our entry into the new aeon should occur in this particular corner of the world. From ancient times, more than any other spot on earth, it has acted as a cultural cauldron mingling east, west, north, and south—so it provides the perfect microcosm of this new age nearly upon us.”

“But if this age is to be a wave, tearing down walls and mingling cultures,” said Wolfgang, “I don’t see how it connects with this part of the world—especially Afghanistan, where Russia’s bloody but insignificant little war is unlikely to affect any culture but that one.”

“Not so insignificant. A turning point has been reached,” said Dacian. “Perhaps you think it coincidence that only this February, the Soviets withdrew from that unfortunate war ten years after invading? The withdrawal came at the precise moment when sunrise during the spring equinox, as I described before, approached one-tenth of one degree of entry into the constellation Aquarius—exactly eleven years and eleven months before the official dawning of the new aeon expected in the year 2001.”

“I agree with Wolfgang,” I told Dacian, stuffing another sheet. “It hardly seems troops marching home from a no-win war will trigger an earthshaking new two-millennium cycle. For the Russians, it seems more like back to business as usual.”

“That’s because no one has asked the key question: Why were the Soviets there in the first place?” said Dacian. “The answer is simple: Just as Hitler had, fifty years before, they were searching for the sacred city.”

Wolfgang and I stopped stuffing books for a moment, our eyes fixed on Dacian. He tapped at the map as if thinking, and favored us with an elusive smile.

“Magical cities have always abounded in the region,” he said. “Some were historically factual, while others were speculation or myth, such as Mongolia’s Chan-du—the Xanadu of Kublai Khan—described by Marco Polo. Or the Himalayan retreat of Shangri-La: according to legend it appears just once every millennium. Then the far western region of China, the republic of Xinjiang: In the nineteen-twenties the Russian mystic Nicholas Roerich recorded tales he collected from Kashmir to Chinese Xinjiang and Tibet of the fabulous sunken city of Shambhala, an oriental version of Atlantis. It was believed this miraculous city once was swallowed by the earth, but that it would rise again quite soon, to usher in the birth of the new aeon.”

Dacian’s eyes were closed, but as he slid his finger across the map, he seemed able to see each of these spots as he touched it. Although he had admitted he was recounting largely myths, they seemed so real to him that I was fascinated. I had to force my attention back to the papers I was supposed to be concealing.

“It is here in Nepal,” he went on, “that for thousands of years Buddhists have believed the lost city of Agharti is buried within Kanchenjunga—the third highest peak in the world, whose name means ‘five holy treasures of the snows.’ Then south of the world’s second highest mountain, K2—in the disputed zone claimed by China, India, and Pakistan—lies another secret hoard of mysterious treasure and sacred manuscripts. The legendary occultist Aleister Crowley, who was first to attempt an ascent of this mountain in 1901, was searching for these. And the most magical mountain in the region is Mount Pamir—formerly Mount Stalin, today Mount Communism—in Tajikistan. At almost twenty-five thousand feet, it’s the highest peak in the Soviet Union. The Zoroastrian Persians viewed this mountain as the chief axis of a power grid connecting sacred points of Europe and the Mediterranean with those of the Near East and Asia—a relay, it is believed by many, that can be activated only under the right circumstances, such as those that will occur at the turn of this next aeon.

“But the most interesting of all these sacred places was a city founded by Alexander the Great around 330 B.C. near today’s Russian-Afghan border. According to legend it was on this spot, thousands of years ago, that a city of great mystery and magic once stood: the last of the fabled seven cities of Solomon.”

“King Solomon?” said Wolfgang in an odd tone. “But is it possible?” He got up, quietly spoke to the librarian outside, pulled the book-laden doors shut, and came back to sit beside me.

I kept stuffing Pandora’s papers into volumes, my head down so no one could look at my face. I knew this reference to Solomon was no casual remark on Dacian’s part, any more than Sam’s many allusions: the Solomon’s knot he’d left on my car mirror, the anagrams and phone memos directing me to Song of Songs. Plenty of input, but what did it mean? I felt like a reactor at critical mass. I sat there trying to shove my control rods back in and focus on the connections. I slid my pile of books to Wolfgang, who handed me another.

“It’s a part of the world few would