The surviving letters of Hajji Ibrahim contain a significant gap between his correspondence from Van and his much later correspondences from Istanbul, while the journal of Vardapet Gevorg also has considerable omissions, though his occasional but unorganized and now scattered papers contain significantly more information regarding the occurrences of these days. I, the humble and sinful editor of these marvelous and terrible tales, have therefore reconstructed the following material from a variety of other sources, visions, and intimations. And God knows best.
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Hajji Ibrahim and his companions, having discovered themselves to not be where they had been mere moments before, but instead, inexplicably, now found themselves in some far darker recess of the earth, down below light and the ordinary flow of time, out of memory of all but God and the oldest, deepest spirits of the underlands.
Meanwhile, far away, back in the stony wadi north of Aleppo, the Bedouin had cautiously approached the sealed up cavern, in fear, not of any firearm riposte issuing forth, but of the dread powers they knew the dark places of the earth held in this stretch of land. Listening at the cracks in the barricade, they heard only the stomp and snort of horses. One waved a hand in front of the barricade. No response from within. Another, bolder, stepped in front, and peered in. Seeing no sign of human activity, the bemused tribesmen hauled down the piled up stones. As soon as they had cleared a sufficient amount, they stood back, and the horses came galloping out, overjoyed to be freed. The Bedouin looked within in terror, not daring to go further in, despite the piles of goods and baggage just within. They muttered prayers to their local saints, clutched their rifles close, and beat a frightened retreat.
In the cavern depths out of time and memory, Hajji Ibrahim wiped the cold sweat from his brow and tried to speak again to his companions, but found his throat was closed tight and dry, and words would no longer come. He waved his hands, but in vain: the gloom was absolute. He crawled in the direction he thought the brave Kurd would be, found him by touch, and tapped on his arm. The courageous Kurd replied only with a like tap, then felt his arms up Hajji Ibrahim’s chest, to his throat, and tapped there, signifying the same sudden malady. From this point on, things began to occur in those depths, whose exact sequence Hajji Ibrahim could never completely untangle, suspecting that the ordinary flow of temporality somehow did not apply, and many things could happen and be perceived simultaneously. Nonetheless, at some moment afterwards they all found that a faint glow was building to two sides of the cavern, a glow that was at once reminiscent of moonlight, yet horribly unlike any light that had ever shone on the earth’s surface. Perhaps it was no light at all, but only the lesser darkness being marked off: for between the two dead glows there grew a great and horrible Darkness, at first utterly without form or shape or sound, but growing more and more distinct as the moments passed, perhaps taking its temporal, this-wordly form from the forms and dispositions of the men present in its hidden lair outside of the walls of the world. Feeding on them. Hajji Ibrahim was certain of this much: that whatever foul spirit or being into whose snare they had fallen, It was intent upon devouring them, and perhaps devouring everything it could come upon.
The Darkness went from silence to a sudden and ear-rending roar, a sound that seemed not aural but plainly material, crashing across the ears and psyches of the men, knocking them on their backs. Then it was utterly silent again. It seemed to gather, then spread, until it was as if four or five distinct bodies of the Darkness loomed over them, on all sides. Hajji Ibrahim felt his very being tighten and constrict, as though some force out of the Darkness were drawing his fibres out, untangling his very inner self, and he was powerless to resist. Visions of blood drops and seines of his own skin and muscle appeared before his eyes, real or unreal, he could not say. Again his terrible dream came to mind, and he felt as if he were watching a shadow play unfold, with his body and spirit and soul actors before his very eyes. It was as if a part of him, or a facsimile, rather, had been ripped from his innermost self, messily, leaving traces and fragments hanging in the air. A vision of his own spirit, or a doubled, yet slightly fainter, less real, version of his spirit, rushed past his eyes, flamed into a thin, yellow, yet burning form of light, then dissipated, gone into the depths. A bit of thin light remained, with a crimson mist of blood enveloping it and moving outwards towards the Darkness in slow spirals. Hajji Ibrahim could see what seemed to be stone overhead, the stone of the world-mountain, perhaps. Perhaps they remained within the shadow of the walls of this world, or below them. Now the Darkness yawned and yipped, now like a dog, now like a dragon waking from slumber, as if pleased by whatever alchemical operation it or its unruly potencies had performed, yet also disturbed by the thin flash of light, which cut into its inner and absolute darkness.
As the light began to fade, Hajji Ibrahim suddenly remembered the piece of paper the majdhub of Damascus had given him. He found it, against hope, within his sleeve, folded. Unfolding it with as much haste as he could manage without tearing it, he found within a talisman: a single circle, with three letters inscribed at certain points: alif, lām, mim. The light floated, floated overhead of them, and the Darkness seemed to circle, waiting. Little time remained. Hajji Ibrahim pointed at the talisman in his hand, motioning to his companions to remain in one place, and with his finger he traced a circle around them, rapidly dashing off the letters. His finger left no trace in the hard stone floor of the cavern, but as he completed the circle, stepping back into the knot of his companions, a blue light gathered along the line of the circle. It grew in intensity, then suddenly burst into a solid wall of cold, intensely bright blue flame, sending the Darkness reeling backwards for the moment. The talismanic paper itself burst into blue flame and was utterly consumed. All of his companions dropped to the ground, in a deep sleep. Only Hajji Ibrahim remained awake: not merely awake, but completely awake, his eyes now able to see further and deeper and more clearly than ever before or ever after in his life.
Now, the mountain’s heart opened up to him as he stood within the Circle, blue, ethereal flame lapping the edge of one half of the Circle, the swaying, bright, red-fiery schema of the mountain’s interior somehow filling the horizon before the other half. For these moments he forgot everything else—the terrible darkness without the Circle, the undead shadow with its fleshless face and the eiry haze of blood——drifting before its ungodly visage. He even forgot his companions, lying in an unconscious heap on the ground around him. His eyes, inner and outer, were utterly taken up with the vision of the cosmic peak rising before him.
The mountain itself was some sort of facsimile, perhaps, though whether it was real in a material or spiritual sense or some other sense, he could never afterwards say. Not that he found the usual categories of reality to be very fitting for the world at large, anyway, an insight he had long before read in texts but in these moments of terror and, as it would turn out, spiritual ecstasy, finally truly realized. He stared, transfixed, looking up and down the layered worlds that seemed to nest within the mountain, all manifest to him at once and singly. At the highest point there was only Light, sheer, pure, and resistant to the searching of his sight, his thought, anything—it was as if he was seeing it from the back of the corner of his eyes yet feeling its rays suffuse every particle of his being. Below the Light were worlds of various sorts, some filled with blisteringly hot and strong stars, others with luminescent darkness, others with hills and forests and wonderful creatures, all cloaked in wings and colors and living jewels. At the base of the mountain was stone, but stone shot through with splendor and—perhaps not the right word, but close—life. Throbbing with life, somehow. If asked, he could not explain it.
A simple enough task. The vision of the mountain disappeared, but the ethereal blue flames continued to flicker. And the Darkness was still there, and he could hear it deliberately sniffing the air, no doubt smelling out his flesh and blood and bone and spirit, eager to devour them as It had devoured many before, he was certain. His companions stirred, and one opened his eyes, only to behold the terrible Darkness, which he too had seen once in a dream. He screamed and screamed and scraped at his eyes with his fingers, until his face bled. The Darkness rose yet higher, until Its shadowed tendrils towered over the tips of the blue flames. And suddenly, before Ibrahim could do or say anything, one of the great black tendrils had swooped down in to their circle and suspended directly before the man who had screamed. His face went blank, as if his soul had vacated, and his lips began to move in some evil chant. But Ibrahim sprang up and interposed himself between the thing and his companion, and, as he grasped his prayer beads in one hand and clutched his other hand to his heart, he felt a strange power rising in him, or through him, and he could feel his heart growing hotter, and a light pulsing out, through his hand, into the thick dead air. The tendril wavered, then rose, wavered again, then met the blue flames, having flagged ever so slightly. The Darkness roared. Drops of what seemed to be blood and filth and oil exploded from every direction, out of every particle it seemed of that foul place. The Darkness roared again, and Ibrahim went cold, and remembered nothing further.
Sohbetname 