We returned to the village in a more silent, demure
frame of mind. My brain was still trying to come to terms with the shocking
piece of information I had just received. If the smell really was that of human
flesh, then the tragedy had to have happened at that same place of the ridge.
By the time we reached the village, the hint of an idea was just beginning to
form in my mind. I asked Lothar if there was a library in the town. He answered
in the negative, but suggested visiting the Sire who had a small collection of
books in his house.
Without wasting any further time I hurried across
to the house down the road where we had had dinner the previous day. On making
my request I was ushered into a back room which had four shelves of books, most
of them dusty and seemingly untouched in a long time. One of the shelves was
dedicated to the geography and history of the region around the village and it
was this that held my attention. After some searching I finally found a book on
the geography of the area. I asked the Sire permission to borrow this book,
along with one containing the important historical occurrences of that region
for the night, wanting to study some of the facets of information it offered.
I hastily returned to Lothar’s house and after a
quick bath and an early supper, I got down to studying the book. Lothar asked
me what it was that had suddenly aroused my interest. I told him I would try to
answer that question the next morning as I myself was not too sure what I was
about to find, if anything at all. Soon afterwards, Lothar went to bed, tired
after our daylong adventure.
I glanced through the contents and stopped at one
called ‘Local Fault Lines’. Turning to the page indicated, I tried to make
sense of the information given there. As I had never studied geography in
detail, I was having a rather difficult time with the language and terms used
in the book. Anyway after the initial struggle I started to get a hang of the
whole affair and more and more of the text started becoming clear. There was a
map of the area. On it was indicated the village, the pastures surrounding it
and much of the route to Skopje. Also shown on the map were the prominent fault
lines in the area. The biggest among them bisected the map diagonally and was
called the Burnot Line. At several places, it ran along what appeared to be the
ridge we had walked that very day.
Something at the back of my mind surmised that
there was something more to this than pure coincidence. After studying the map
a little longer I decided to retire as it had been a long day and I intended to
wake up early the next morning to continue my study of the books.
Well I must have been asleep when the realization
dawned on me, for when I awoke the next morning, the hint that had been nagging
me much of the previous day had crystallized into a definite possibility. I
leaped out of bed and dashed to the table where I had left the books the
previous night. Opening the geography book to the page on fault lines, I turned
my attention to the history book. On looking up the entries under 1963, I
finally found what I was looking for: a newspaper article dated 16 Aug, 1963.
‘ On Tuesday, the fourteenth of August an
earthquake shook the ridge to the north west of the town of Septerinsk. What
was fortunate as well as almost unbelievable was the fact that in spite of
being so close, the residents of the village hardly felt anything at all. From
what information has been gained, nobody was injured in the quake and there was
no destruction of property either. In fact most of the residents heard about it
only in the next day’s news. Though the precise root cause of the quake is yet
to be determined, some experts claim that it was caused due to the shift of
tectonic plates along the famed Burnot Line.’
I immediately extracted my cell phone from my inner
jacket pocket and dialed my good friend Curt, who had taken up studying
Geography as his hobby as well as passion, while not at work. After telling him
where I was, I asked him if it was possible for a mountain ridge to split apart
as a result of the shift of tectonic plates underground and then sliding back
into the original position. After some thought, he told me that he would call
back in a short while after consulting with a couple of like minded colleagues.
I began to pack my bags as I was to leave for home
that day. When I was ready, I made my way to the Sire’s house, accompanied by
Lothar to thank him for his hospitality and kindness for putting me up in the
town for the last two days. As I stood there voicing my suspicions to the Sire
about the Burnot fault, my phone rang. I picked it up. It was Curt at the other
end, “Hi Eldor ; about what you asked me regarding the ‘ ridge splitting’
business, it is perfectly plausible though extremely uncommon. As a matter of
fact only three such occurrences are known to have occurred in eastern Europe
in the last hundred years.” How badly I wanted to tell him that a fourth had
just been discovered, but then decided against it as I did not expect him to
believe me. That bit of information, I would reveal at a better place and time.
I continued my explanation to the Sire, of what I
had concluded had taken place that night. The group was sleeping when the
earthquake struck. A large gulf opened up along the ridge, into which all those
unfortunate men fell. The tectonic plates moved once again, this time in the
opposite direction, causing the sides of the hole to return to its original
position, trapping a hundred and twenty soldiers in the mud beneath the brow of
the hill. Also as it was a rainy day, any newly created projections or
depressions on the ridge would have been nullified by the water flowing
everywhere so that by the time the Sire, along with his two escorts had reached
there, the ridge seemed to be just the way it should have been.
The Sire seemed to have got quite worked up at this
new possibility. A spark had lit up his eyes and he thanked me profusely for
associating a feasible explanation with the disappearance. Finally he could
tell the villagers something more concrete and believable than some dumb
superstition about a creature that lived in the woods and went around snatching
up people at midnight.
On leaving the Sire’s house, I thanked Lothar for
being my host for the past two days and invited him to stay with me anytime he
visited my city. After a brief farewell speech to the other villagers, I
started out on my journey back home.
No comments:
Post a Comment