Siro by David Ignatius (short books to read txt) 📕

tomb. They walked in cautiously under a crumbling brick archway, across the broad outer courtyard of the shrine and into the inner sanctum. It was musty inside, and so dark you could barely see the blue tiles on the walls. In the central chamber that held the sarcophagus of Tamerlane, even the sharp-eyed Uzbek pilgrims needed a few moments to become accustomed to the dark. The men shuffled and muttered; the women put their hands to their faces and whispered prayers. And then an old woman, a grandmother layered with the fat of a dozen childbirths, saw something amiss.

“Allah!” she cried, pointing to the tomb.

The other pilgrims looked toward the sarcophagus, made of jade that had once been green but was now almost black from age and neglect. The heavy jade lid of the sarcophagus had been pushed back several feet, opening the warrior’s tomb.

“Allah!” said the old woman again, her voice trembling.

“The Prince of War has escaped!” whispered the oldest man in the group. He said it tentatively, hopefully, the way one of the disciples might have said, “Christ is risen!” on the first Easter morning.

The small room echoed, as others repeated the words. As these voices began to resonate in the small brick chamber, the old woman suddenly let out a shriek and pointed across the marble screen that surrounded Tamerlane’s resting place toward a simpler mud-caked bier known as the Tomb of the Unknown Hajji. Embedded in that burial mound was the trunk of a poplar tree, tall as a telephone pole. Atop the poplar, suspended by a string, was a banner proclaiming in Arabic script: “Allahu akhbar!” God is great!

“Allahu akhbar!” cried the venerable old man, who learned to read the Koran as a boy, before the great modern darkness descended on Central Asia.

“Ahhhhh,” gasped several of the Uzbeks.

“La ilaha illa-Llah,” said the old man, repeating the Koranic injunction: There is no god but God.

“Allah! Allah!” chanted one of the Turkmen. He said the words quickly, with each breath of air, one after the other, like a Sufi zikr. Others repeated the chant, the sound surging louder and louder until it became a guttural rumble and the small chamber began to reverberate with the emotion of the pilgrims.

The noise aroused the guard, who came running into the mausoleum. When he saw the open tomb and the banner, he turned and ran from the chamber out into the courtyard, toward the telephone. The Moslem pilgrims rushed out after him, bellowing and chanting, disappearing down the small lanes and blind alleys that radiated out from the square. Ten minutes later the first contingent of militia arrived on their three-wheeled motorcycles, then a second detachment and a third, until they had surrounded the place. After thirty minutes, the army, too, had arrived from a nearby garrison. The troops, like the militiamen, were mostly native Uzbeks and they looked frightened. For already, on their way to the Gur Emir, they had heard rumors of what the pilgrims had found inside the tomb.

What thrilled the people—and frightened their keepers—was that every Uzbek knew it had happened once before, nearly forty years earlier. The tomb of Tamerlane had been opened then, and the Prince of War truly had been set loose upon the world. That earlier cataclysm had begun when the worshippers of Lenin, the apostles of science and progress, had come east with their charts and instruments to conduct experiments at the tomb. They came at the behest of a famous scientist, Academician Gerasimov, whose name and academic credentials were invoked before the natives like the incantation of a village headman. The holy academician, they were told, was an expert in reconstructing the face of a dead person from the surviving bones and dust, and he proposed to work his magic now on the face of the sublime conqueror Timur, the man who had razed entire towns—slaughtered every man, woman and child—if they so much as hinted at opposition. And now this Gerasimov wanted to measure the distance between the bridge of the great conqueror’s nose and his occipital bone, reconstruct the set of his jaw, stretch artificial skin across the remains of his princely cheekbones. The Uzbeks had opposed it, had pleaded against it, but the academicians from Moscow paid no attention.

Gerasimov’s men had come to Samarkand and pried open the great jade coffin and removed the noble remains of Tamerlane. They said they wanted to find out if he really had been lame, as legend had it, so they measured his femur and his tibia and conducted other such worthy experiments. Perhaps they paused momentarily to read the inscription on the lid: “The Spirit of War Rests Within This Tomb”—which was surely a “Do Not Disturb” sign, left centuries before. But it can only have made them laugh. So they pressed down on their crowbars and pried open the heavy jade …

The day the academicians opened Tamerlane’s tomb was June 21, 1941. history records that on that very day Hitler made his decision to invade the Soviet Union. It was a day on which the spirit of war truly burst forth—with greater savagery, perhaps, than at any time since Timur walked the earth five centuries ago. To the superstitious people of Central Asia, it had been obvious enough what had happened. Cause and effect.

And it would have been obvious, too, to any amateur student of Oriental ethnology; to any visiting American who happened to overhear several Pakistani friends narrate this astonishing tale, as Edward Stone did one evening during a visit to Peshawar. For such a person, it would have been almost impossible, once he had heard the tale, not to contrive an experiment that would test what might happen in the vast and silent lands of Central Asia if the tomb were to become open once again. It took so little effort—a few clever Uzbek operatives based in Peshawar—and it had the potential to cause so much trouble. But at first, for Stone, it was a game;