The City Beyond Time

An adventure for Istanbul PCs, working for the Manzikert Hotel.

Gerard and Norman Nairn, two laconic Kiwi brothers who served with General Allenby’s motorised divisions in the Sinai and Palestine Campaign of the Great War, now run a mail service across the desert from Damascus to Baghdad. They lost two cars last month and they would like you to find out why.

Desert-adapted Cadillac Type 63s. Drivers in smoked goggles - one-eyed Yank Jack Reid, who likes to chase down cheetahs with his car, and Ryan the Australian who keeps his water bottles full of potent arak. Following an ancient caravan route, re-opened by the sheikh and gold smuggler Mohammed ibn Bassam. Travelling in pairs. Going without sleep for forty-eight hours straight.

Damascus - Palmyra - Rutbah - Ramadi - Baghdad. Right across the heart of the sandless Syrian Desert. Plains of flat packed clay that turn slick and greasy in the rainy season. Lava beds strewn with fist-sized boulders. Poverty-maddened outcast Bedouins lurking in dry wadis and oases, in the ruins of Umayyad outposts, who’ll rob and strip naked any traveller. Riding white camels and stolen Cadillacs of their own.

You sometimes see strange things out in the desert. Mirages. White towers on the horizon, palm-fringed lakes where no water has flown for millenia. Caravans of dancing girls, silk tents, turbaned men with huge jewelled scimitars, who fade and disappear into smoke when you get close. Jinns. Packs of chuckling striped hyenas who dig corpses out of the barren earth.

The convoy drivers like to think they can handle anything. The Nairn Transport Company sets each one up with a house and a woman in Damascus, to keep them out of trouble. Ryan is shacked up with Mervat, a Circassian nightclub hostess, in a cramped two-room apartment, strewn with Persian rugs, behind an ice cream parlour in the al-Hamidiyah souq. When he isn’t drunk you can find him smoking his nargilah on the roof.

Ghouls raided his caravan last week. Brutes in bug-eyed insectoid helmets, wielding laser guns. They rode metallic discs that skimmed across the surface of the desert, atop clouds of smoke, leaving strange coiled patterns in the dust. He shot three of them and knocked one’s helmet off - saw the dead blank eyes and the dopey flat hyena smile. Jack Reid took a laser to the thigh, and was dragged away - he might be still alive.

Ryan fled into the desert. Hid all night long in a dry wadi, listening out for the canine howling of the search parties and the discs’ aerodynamic hum. Drank his own urine to stay alive. Rescued by Bedouins after three days - blind luck they didn’t cut his throat.

The French Army, led by Maurice Gamelin - a stubborn old man with nineteenth-century ideas about “fighting spirit” and a bodyguard of Malagasy tirailleurs - is bogged down in the Anti-Lebanon Mountains and the dead volcanic plateaus of the Jabal al-Druze, fighting guerilla rebels that spring up as quickly as they’re put down.

Scarred Foreign Legionnaires from all corners of the world clash with Druze mountain warriors, student nationalists in the Ghouta countryside, Bedouin raiders from the Euphrates town of Deir ez-Zor. Most of the rebel leaders have been killed by now - captured and hung, or poisoned outside cafes by French spies. But the war against the Mandate stubbornly declines to end.

Sultan al-Atrash, the great chief of the Druze, has fled with all his men to the castle town of Karak in Transjordan. Gendarmes tramp the streets of the Druze capital of Soweida, where prophets are kept chained to dungeon floors, and mystics can make eggs jump from boiling water by reading certain passages from the Koran. Palaces on snowy mountainsides are raided - young men dragged away in cuffs to squalid jails.

The Druze never lie, are eternally hospitable, give freely to the poor, and exile anyone who marries outside the faith. They believe that if there aren’t enough Druze babies, the excess souls of dead warriors will reincarnate on a mountain in western China. One day the Chinese Druze will link up with the Syrians to take over the world.

Recently their soldiers have been armed with laser guns - making life hard for the gendarmes.

It’s said they trade with jinns in the heart of the al-Safa lava field in the dead of night, on the shores of a boiling magma lake, by a cairn inscribed with ancient Safaitic inscriptions. They sell guns and other artefacts - brass eggs that hatch into smoke demons, fish-scaled invisibility cloaks - to the Veiled Lady of Mukhtara, in the Jumblatt Palace, and the Rufai Howling Dervishes, who self-mutilate with red-hot skewers in order to see God.

It’s also said they worship golden calves. Druze deny this furiously - do not bring it up.

Gamelin suspects, correctly, that the rebels are covertly funded by King Faisal I of Iraq, who wants to add Syria to his realm and is still upset about the Sykes-Picot Agreement. He’s been hearing disturbing rumours.

Faisal’s agents been digging through the ruins of Haroun al-Rashid’s House of Wisdom, hunting down the manuscripts of Abdullah al-Hazrad - 8th-century author of the Necronomicon, who was devoured in broad daylight by invisible demons in the Damascus marketplace, and who’s said to have deposited certain cryptic artefacts from the Rub’ al-Khali in the Aramaean crypts beneath the Umayyad Mosque.

A map was discovered. Faisal has found Iram of the Pillars. He intends to marry his son Ghazi to its queen.

Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra, fled into the desert after her defeat by the Emperor Aurelian in the third century AD. Accompanied by her general, Septimius Zabdas, and her court philosopher Cassius Longinus. Leaving a servant double to be paraded through Rome in her place.

There she entered Iram of the Pillars. An ancient city of the Serpent Men, preserved by illusion magic, dislodged from space and time. Perfumed gardens, ziggurats, water wheels turning in lotus-strewn canals.

Pools of fish sacred to the mermaid goddess Derceto, tended by long-haired dancing eunuch priests. Children playing at the feet of friendly giants. Tombs of mummified aliens - bas-relief maps of the prehistoric world. The singing colossi of Memnon, bearded with dew, vibrating in the dawn.

Now she’s returned. The headless blemmyes serve her, and the cynocephali, hyena-headed men produced by grotesque Serpent Man experiments. A retinue of Amazons, named after legendary queens, who mutilate the men they love. Mavia, Stratonice, Zabibi. Jack Reid is living comfortably with their commander, Semiramis - she’s trying to persuade him to let her cut off and eat his foot.

She serves the god Bel - an avatar of the Horned King. She believes the physical world is a delusion and must be destroyed. Her plan is to expel the French, make herself Queen of Arabia and use that as a foundation for global conquest. She’s still weak though - she can’t fully bring her legions into the world. The rebels have to bring her captives to make her stronger - she feeds them to the fish.

T. E. Lawrence spent some time after the war looking for Iram, the Atlantis of the Sands. Somewhere on the Syria-Iraq border. It’s guarded by jinn - you have to bring them gifts, or answer their riddles. The Druze can help you get there, if they want to.

A temple in the hills of Kurdistan, among the mulberry trees. Hewn from solid rock. Built over torchlit caverns where homage is paid to the brass idol of the Peacock Angel, Melek Taus, tasked by God to preside over this world.

Holds the Courtyard of the Black Serpent, where the Satan Tower stands. A tall white cone-shaped structure with prismatic rays flashing from its pinnacle. One of seven, scattered across Asia, in a line from here to Manchuria through Persia and Tibet. Each inhabited by a kolchak, a devil-priest and radio operator, who transmits evil thoughts on occult frequencies into the minds of men. So it’s said.

Home to Mir Said Beg, the Black Pope of the Yazidi devil worshippers, in his red turban and black cloak. A foe of Gnosticism - likes the world as it is and does not want to see it swept away. Supports the British, since they keep his people safe from Muslim persecution. Thinks you have misunderstood the “devil” thing. Bad guys want to wreck the Satan Towers - they repel alien invaders and keep the world intact.

Yazidis, at least these ones, have some rules. They can’t put out fires and are repulsed by the colour blue - which most Arabs deem sacred. If you draw a circle in the dirt around them, they’re not allowed to leave it before the next sunrise. If you say a word that sounds like “Satan” in their presence, they’re supposed to kill you, and will take that rule more seriously than you’d hope.

Nadir-Lugh, the head kolchak, has been sent to Damascus with a bodyguard of Kurdish mountain fighters and instructions to destroy Iram of the Pillars. He has a glittering rainbow powder which if thrown into the sacred pool of Atargatis will kill all the fish and make the city crumble back into the sands, lost for another thousand years. He’s more or less on your side.