Road to Ubar Pa - Nicholas Clapp [16]
Our hopes high, we passed between the pillars and entered the temple. It took several minutes for our eyes to adjust to the gloom inside. Quietly, hardly exchanging a word, we picked our way forward and were startled by the sight of a procession of drunken revelers reeling along behind the god Dionysus. They were figures on a frieze decorating a stone altar, figures frozen in time. We were awestruck. This had to be the very spot where, 2,300 years ago, Alexander the Great, the Macedonian king and conqueror, had come upon monuments to Hercules and Dionysus...
But alas, just when Alexander the Great became part of my theory concerning the Psalter Map, my theory fell apart. I discovered that though the Macedonian hero's conquests had been very real, they had given rise to some of the most outlandish fantasies of all time: the "Alexander books." Allegedly dating to an account written by one of his generals, these tales were popular well into medieval times. There were Armenian and Ethiopian Alexander books, an Indonesian version and an Icelandic one. They were forerunners of Gulliver's Travels and superhero comic books. In their pages Alexander encounters amazons, mermaids, and men who live on the smell of spices. He marvels at fleas the size of tortoises and lobsters as big as ships. He soars through the air in a griffin-powered flying machine and dives to the bottom of the Persian Gulf in a goatskin submarine.
It was likely, then, that whoever created the Psalter Map, probably a monk long on imagination (and short on spelling), had an Alexander book tucked under his straw pillow. And it turns out that the map's are liberi n colime er culis were not only fragments of spurious iconography, but they were inked in the wrong place. As the Alexander books have it, they should be in India; instead, they were set down in Arabia. There's a reason for this. In the Psalter Map, India is bisected by a wall built by Alexander to keep the rapacious hordes of the giants Gog and Magog from overrunning the world. The iconography of this takes up so much space that depictions of other Alexandrian events, like his pillar and altar encounter, had to be expeditiously shifted to the neighboring emptiness of Arabia, where Alexander never set foot. In either reality or legend. 5
The realization that the are liberi n colime er culis had nothing to do with Ubar was naturally disappointing. It had taken several weeks of spare time to decode the Psalter Map's promising inscription, find it worthless, and then figure out why. I must admit, though, I enjoyed the diversion. The Alexander books were surprisingly well plotted, and wildly entertaining. For instance, in an Armenian version written in the first person, Alexander, guided by the stars, crosses a desert that is anything but deserted:
The inhabitants of that place said that there are wild men and evil beasts there ... There were men each twenty-four cubits tall; and they had long necks, and their hands and fingers were like saws...
Moving on we came to a place where there were headless men. They had no heads at all, but had their eyes and their mouths on their chests, and they talked with their tongues like men ... Then there appeared to us, about nine or ten o'clock, a man as hairy as a goat. I thought of capturing the man for he was ferociously and brazenly barking at us. And I ordered a woman to undress and go to him on the chance that he might be vanquished by lust. But he took the woman and went far away where, in fact, he ate her.6
In their bizarre way, the Alexander books were instructive, for here was a good take on how myth worked. In the past I had read of myth as "hieratic" or "teleodidactic," cryptic cultural constructs that I could never quite grasp. Here myth was anything but arcane; it was a lively, mischievous animal with scissor hands, barking at us, that delighted in pouncing on the truth and making a merry hash of it. Yet shards of truth survive. There was an Alexander, and he did have great adventures. The Alexander books were reasonably