The Lost Civilization of Suolucidir. Susan Daitch

was relieved to see the city rise before him like an oasis. He knew it was real, and it was also home. He quickly ran through the maze, reached his house, a square two-story building the color of melon rind. In his long absence he’d so often dreamed of its two rooms, one on top of the other. Ravenous, when food was placed in front of him, he scooped up sticky pieces of rice and lamb with his hands without stopping for any ritual washing. Before he could show his family the silk and spices in his bags, just as he was about to swallow a mouthful of lamb, a sandstorm swept over the city like a tidal wave so high even the square lookout towers were buried without a trace. If this wasn’t what reduced the city to a basin of sand, the catastrophe might have taken the form of an earthquake. In a few minutes all that poked out above the surface of the rubble was the jagged edge of a wall, the blade of an axe, a human arm, maybe. And if the city survived the irritated shoulder shrug of tectonic plates there was Taftan, four thousand forty-two meters in height, a volcano that rose abruptly from the midst of the flat landscape. One big burst of lava and groves of olive, almond, and cherry trees would be reduced to cinders, the child offering milk to the cat, the lips about to touch, blade suspended mid-air, all frozen, turned to stone. For whatever reason, the city was destroyed.

       The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language.

      Karl Marx

       The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

      BARELY HAD THE FEET OF the last Shah of Iran left the ground in Tehran when hundreds of miles away I was sitting on a ledge in the mountainous region of southeast Sistan-va-Baluchistan watching a herd of goats make their way though a wadi in search of grass or water. I’d been exploring the caves in the area, even though my visa was about to expire, and it was becoming clearer by the hour that I was as likely to find the object of my search as to find hidden shahi missiles or the demon Zahhak himself, snakes growing out of his shoulders. Evidence that hinted at earlier cultures hidden in the foothills of the Black Mountains was just out of reach. European digs in this province once yielded slight clues of an ancient civilization, but even with little to go on, archaeologists were able to speculate that a city-state that had resisted both Alexander and Mongol invaders may have flourished here. Others claimed it was all hoax. There had never been such a city, only the feverish dreams of Victorian adventurers who had become lost en route to Khandahar or Lahore. Speculations persisted, but the arguments surrounding this controversial lost city with its rumored splendor, mechanical inventiveness and imperial culture grew so contentious (threatening to reach a pitch not unlike the arguments of Darwinian evolutionist pitted against devout creationist) that the discussions died down to whispers and then finally nothing at all was audible in any language.

      Nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century digging parties exploring this segment of what is now the beak-shaped area bordering Afghanistan, Iran, and West Pakistan generally came up empty-handed. During the Victorian era there were rumors about relics glimpsed by a few, and these tales fueled the dying embers of the debate. Prior to the Second World War a few parchment scrolls were alleged to have been found by a pair of Soviet émigrés, Sidonie and Bruno Nieumacher. Mishandled, as some of the Dead Sea Scrolls would be years later, most of these priceless records were said to have been reduced to lumps of glue, unredeemable, and therefore rendered utterly mute. Those fragments that did survive lay in an archive in Tehran, rarely visited.

      Others may have been eager to follow in the footsteps of these earlier archaeologists, but intervening wars, earthquakes, sandstorms, and landslides made the area particularly inaccessible. Pahlavi had come to power in 1925, changing the name of Persia to Iran. The Pahlavi shahs and the theocratic regimes that followed discouraged excavations, and indeed, the translators of what were known as the Zahedan fragments were arrested and most likely executed in the prisons of Shah Reza Pahlavi during the era of Iran’s alliance with the Axis powers of World War II. After the war no one picked up the thread of the Nieumachers’ work. It was as if the couple had never existed, either one of them. Even today, when one arrives at the foothills of the Sistan-va-Baluchistan mountains, local legends are so rife with stories of djinn-haunted caves that it remains difficult to hire a guide who will take you into the area where the lost city is likely to be located.

      I knew of the Nieumachers from my father, who traveled to Iran after the war as a consulting mineralogist. He worked for a mining company and made many trips abroad. Usually the gifts he brought home were in the rock department: agate ashtrays from lava beds around Lake Superior, feldspar bookends from Colorado, carnelian and turquoise from Tibet, sheets of mica which gave the room a kaleidoscopic appearance when held up to the eye, bits of fools’ gold I brought into a second grade class claiming the chunks were real, a jagged piece of smoky quartz that when tilted a certain way looked like Groucho Marx in profile, smoking a cigar. A trip to Iran in June 1967 yielded no souvenirs apart from Sidonie Nieumacher’s field notes, which he told none of us about. The Nieumacher documents had been given to him by an Iranian mineralogist who had found them during the course of renovating a house he’d bought in Zahedan. The pages were confusing because Sidonie Nieumacher’s identity documents tucked into an inside cover indicated she was a Christian, born in Alsace, but she wrote in Yiddish. Because of the Hebrew script my father’s Iranian colleague had not wanted her field notes in his house, fearing it would be incriminating should his home be searched for whatever random reason, as was often the case. People informed or misinformed, but the result was the same: those reported on disappeared. This was how my father acquired the Suolucidir papers. I’d never seen him so relieved to be home as when he returned from that trip.

      He worked from a room in the attic, a mess full of papers, books and journals, some stalagmite-like piles weighted by a lump of jasper or a slice of blue slate sprinkled with the impressions of fingernail-size fossils. Here, at night, he translated the field notes, writing the English into a separate notebook, tapping a Chesterfield into the agate ashtray. Though Sidonie Nieumacher’s notes revealed that she had actually been born Eliana Katzir of Grodno Gibernia, she was not, as far as my father could tell, an agent of the Zionist state (as his Iranian host feared), which had not yet been officially declared at that time anyway. The two notebooks, Sidonie’s original and my father’s translation, were bound together by a thick rubber band that cracked and broke but stuck to the covers of the books long after it lost its elasticity. What my father thought of the contents I’ll never know. He returned to his work surveying volcanic outcroppings that dotted the western plains, compared the sediment of Jurassic and Mississippian layers of rock, sending back model airplane kits, fluorescent rocks, postcards of geysers, the kinds of things he thought I would like. I remember him holding a metamorphic piece of quartzite up to the light. The veins switchbacked on its surface like frozen billabongs. You could, as a very small child, think big was as big as stretching your arms wide as far as possible, but at the same time I knew that for my father big was measured by unimaginably vast units. The universe for him was the prelapsarian universe: billions of small or enormous planetary rocks hurtling around, sometimes under fantastic pressure and thereby transforming parts of themselves from magma to marble, from anthracite to diamonds. Animals and humans have yet to evolve, and when they do, their tantrums and triumphs appear too minuscule to bother with. It was just as well he lived, to a degree, so armored from human activity. Sidonie’s field notes are terrifying.

      As I said, my father never mentioned the notebook to me, so I didn’t know what he thought about its contents. His second wife was cleaning out some drawers after his death, and it was only by chance that I stopped by her bungalow and rescued it from a Miami incinerator. That night, on the flight back to New York I avidly read his translation of Sidonie’s field notes as if they were a window into a hidden part of my father’s life as well.

      Somewhere in the southeastern edge of the Pacific a shark is spawned who will, in a few years, eat a surfer,