The Banks of the Euphrates

The Banks of the Euphrates is the first chapter of The Travels of Dagobert Winter. The full text can be seen below.

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‘Live every day an it were thy last’. I should have listened to him.

What follows, dear reader, is an account of my travels; of my fate, and my sorrow. I was wrong. Or rather, I dread that I was right. My actions have freed the Man in Red, and now, he is left to walk the word once more. But enough of that; I shan’t start at the end of the story. Read closely, for I will recount this tale whence it began, and then, I shall go to meet my destiny.

It was on a rainy September night near fourty-seven years ago that I first heard word of the Man in Red. When my good friend Martin, God save his soul, told me of a Professor at the renowned University of Greifswald who had been denied the necessary funds for an expedition into the Land Between the Rivers in which he sought to track down the origin of Saint Nicholas himself, I all but laughed at the thought—a learned man, making a fool out of himself, chasing after a children’s tale.

In the end, the fool was I. Nearly a decade later, having recently attained tenure at that very same university, I was granted the office of the late August Gotthold Meyer. It was not until years later, the summer I turned fourty-three, at the twenty-five-year anniversary of my graduation, when I once again met with Martin—he and I having went our separate ways nigh two decades before—who, after I informed him of my professorship, stared at me in disbelief before reminding me of what he had told me all these years ago; for the man that had sought the origin of Father Christmas in the ruins of ancient Mesopotamia was none other than that very same August Meyer whose office I had inherited.

What a coincidence, I thought. And I should have left it at that. An idle fancy of a delirious scholar, too absorbed in his work, or perhaps not absorbed enough, to conceive of such a ridiculous notion. That much I knew and recognised, but alas, there came the day that I had a fancy of my own—the day I pried open the chest with Meyer’s belongings I had stowed away in a dark corner of the office and began to read through his notes. After perusing pages upon pages of increasingly delirious writing, I at length happened upon a small worn book, bound in leather and sealed with an iron lock. The lock was much newer than the book itself, and it appeared that Meyer had affixed it himself. Unshackling it with a key I had found while rummaging the chest, I was presented with a text, written by a monk’s hand, partly in Greek, partly in Latin, which, though confusing and erratic, was nothing my academic mind couldn’t untangle.

The book spoke of the Man in Red; of the Council, and of their quarrels. It ended abruptly, and left me wanting more—perhaps, it occurs to me now, Meyer had felt the same, and perhaps, that is why he decided to lock it away in the end. I continued to search the professor’s belongings, but could find nothing of interest. I was about to give up, when my hand brushed against the bottom of the chest, and found it to be much higher up than I would have imagined. A closer inspection revealed a false bottom, removing which I was met with a venerable collection of yet more pages, some held together carefully by string and iron clasps, others strewn about in disarray. Most of them were abject nonsense—theories about the Man in Red that Meyer had dismissed as fables or hearsay—but there was one he seemed to have held in high regard: it consisted of two dozen or so pages that formed a neatly arranged treatise which, so claimed Meyer in his analysis, was the writing of none other than the late Reverend Edward Hincks—the very same who had decyphered cuneiform largely by himself but a few decades prior. This, so Meyer, was all he managed to obtain of Hincks’ writing during a secret underground auction in Ireland a few years before his death.

Most of the text was a translation, or an attempt at one, of a series of Sumerian tablets Hincks had wished, for some reason or another, to remain outside public knowledge—a brief foreword hastily scribbled onto the back of the first page going even so far as to claim that they should have been left interred where they were found. And yet, he too fell victim to the scholar’s curiosity: Unable to bring himself to dispose of them, he eventually began transcribing and eventually translating them. Soon, he had at his hands what I now consider to have been the most dangerous text in the world. Of course, that was back then, for at present, the damage has already been done.

Much to my chagrin now, I was never one to believe in superstition. Later that day, thoroughly ignoring Hincks’ warnings, I read the entirety of his treatise, and it was illuminating. By the end of it, I had no doubt left in me that Meyer was right all along. That there was something hidden amongst the ruins of Sumer that could prove to be the greatest discovery of our time, and the greatest achievement of my life. As for Meyer, by the time he stumbled upon this text, his reputation was already ruined, and the whole of the faculty regarded him as nothing more than an old fool chasing after a children’s tale. I, however, wasn’t Meyer. When I requested funding for an archeological expedition, my peers thought naught of it. And so, I assembled a team consisting of myself, three of my graduate students, who had previously expressed interest in Sumer, my wife Charlotte, who insisted she come along after hearing how long I planned to be away, our son Christopher, and finally, my old classmate Martin, the only one I had revealed my true intentions to.

Since I had no idea how much time this endeavour would take up, we decide to defer our journey to the coming year. It was already August, and if we had departed then, we would have reached the Italian coast around early September, and ever since ancient times, we have known better than to travel the Mediterranean in Autumn or Winter. Thus, I immersed myself in what had theretofore remained unread of Meyer’s writings, trying to find any clue that I might have missed, but the only thing I found was paranoia. It appears that, late in his life, Meyer had grown to think that someone, or, as he described it, something, was following him; watching him; threatening him. The writing was on the wall then, but ignorant me failed to notice it. At the same time, I had, by that time, been continuing Meyer’s research for almost five months—if, unlike him, in secret—and nothing ill of the sort had befallen me. And so, I once again wrote off his claims as a product of elderly delusion, for it was now early March: the time to depart had come.

On the 17th March 1899, we bad Greifswald farewell. Little did I know that I would never set foot in it again. We went our way south until we arrived at Trieste in April. Thence, we travelled the Mediterranean until, at length, we arrived in Beirut in early May, whence we travelled further south and west still until we arrived at the recently-founded city of Nasiriyah on the banks of the Euphrates. Our first objective after our arrival was to locate a ‘harbour’ mentioned in both Hincks’ and Meyer’s writings, which, at the time, was our only lead to the origin of the Man in Red.

As to the exact location of this harbour, Hincks’ writings gave no indication, but Meyer suspected it lie somewhere on the southern border of Sumer, whither the Persian Gulf extended in antiquity. Thus, we resolved to commence our search in the nearby ruins of Ur, the Sumerian city closest to the sea. After resting awhile to recover from an arduous two months of travel, and anon obtaining permission from the local governor to set up camp near the ruins, we gathered most of our belongings and made for what remained of the city of Ur.